In the Devil's Snare (15 page)

“A WHEEL WITHIN A WHEEL”

On April 21, Thomas Putnam addressed a letter to Hathorne and Corwin. Offering “humble and hearty thanks” for the “great care and pains” the magistrates had so far taken on behalf of the afflicted, he ventured to tell them “of what we conceive you have not heard, which are high and dreadfull: of a wheel within a wheel, at which our ears do tingle.” His news, he declared, showed “the tremendous works of divine providence” the Village was experiencing “not only every day but every hour.”
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Putnam’s missive enclosed the report of a vision that had appeared to his daughter the previous evening. Ann saw “the Apperishtion of a Minister at which she was greviously affrighted and cried out oh dreadfull: dreadfull here is a minister com.” The specter tortured Ann while she carried on a dialogue with him, resolutely refusing to write in his book “tho he tore me al to peaces.” “It was a dreadfull thing,” she told him, “that he which was a Minister that should teach children to feare God should com to perswad poor creatures to give their souls to the divill.” After repeatedly refusing to tell her who he was, the specter finally revealed his identity: presently he tould me that his name was George Burroughs and that he had had three wives: and that he had bewitched the Two first of them of death: and that he kiled Mist. Lawson because she was so unwilling to goe from the village and also killed Mr Lawsons child because he went to the eastward with Sir Edmon and preached soe: to the souldiers and that he had bewicthed a grate many souldiers to death at the eastword, when Sir Edmon was their. and that he had made Abigail Hobbs a wicth and: severall wicthes more . . . and he also tould me that he was above wicth for he was a cunjurer.
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Thus there emerged for the first time during the witchcraft crisis the name of George Burroughs, who was to be convicted of witchcraft and hanged in August. Burroughs, in many ways the key figure in the entire affair, linked Salem Village and Falmouth, Essex County and Maine, the Wabanakis and the witches. When Cotton Mather wrote
The Wonders of the
Invisible World
in the fall of 1692 to defend the trials, “Government” (that is, Governor Sir William Phips) ordered him to include “some Account” of the prosecution of Burroughs in his book, making it the one case Mather described that he himself did not select for consideration. When (also in the fall of 1692) Increase Mather penned
Cases of Conscience
to question some of the verdicts, he revealed that Burroughs’s was the only trial he attended, and that, despite his general criticisms of the proceedings, “had I been one of his Judges, I could not have acquitted him.” The minister’s importance was therefore clearly understood in 1692, but Burroughs has hitherto received remarkably little attention from historians of the witchcraft crisis.
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Abigail Hobbs’s confession of April 19, coupled with Ann Jr.’s spectral encounter with George Burroughs on the evening of April 20, transformed the 1692 witchcraft crisis from a serious but not wholly unprecedented set of incidents into the extraordinary event that played out over the next six months.
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Immediately after Abigail confirmed the devil’s presence in Falmouth and Ann Jr. revealed that Burroughs, his minion, had worked in concert with the Wabanakis by bewitching Sir Edmund Andros’s troops, the number of accusations skyrocketed. Before the end of April, fifteen new complaints were filed—thus more than doubling the number of accused witches in just ten days. Between Monday, May 2, and Monday, June 6 (after which came a nearly month-long hiatus in accusations), another thirty-nine people were charged with committing witchcraft.

All the new accusations stemmed from the same source—the ties Abigail and Ann Jr. had drawn between the visible and invisible assaults against New England—but the mechanisms by which they were produced differed. Some of the suspects, like Bridget Bishop, had long been thought to be witches by their fellow townspeople. Such individuals, including men known as fortune-tellers and practitioners of countermagic in addition to the stereotypical quarrelsome older women, had commonly aroused gossip but not formal complaints. Others did not fit such standard patterns but instead, like George Burroughs, were suspected of complicity with the French and the Wabanakis. The connection forged by Abigail Hobbs and Ann Putnam Jr. coupled Essex County residents’ concerns about the conflict with the Wabanakis with their ongoing anxiety about bewitchment. Believing that their region was engaged in warfare with spectral as well as real attackers, they hastened to complain to the authorities about anyone they thought was linked to the devil in any way.

Satan’s most obvious allies consisted both of suspected local malefic practitioners and of people with frontier ties. The coalition between Satan and the Wabanakis identified by afflicted accusers and confessors gave Essex residents’ current situation cosmic significance and made them sensitive to any hint of collusion between their fellow colonists and visible or invisible enemies. Like Cotton Mather, many concluded that “the Prodigious War, made by the Spirits of the Invisible World upon the People of New-England, in the year, 1692, . . . might have some of its Original among the Indians, whose chief Sagamores are well known unto some of our Captives, to have been horrid Sorcerers, and hellish conjurers and such as Conversed with Dæmons.” Consequently they sought avidly to identify the traitors in their midst.
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Abigail Hobbs had known George Burroughs in Falmouth, but she did not initially name the clergyman as Satan’s cohort. Instead, Ann Jr. made that crucial identification. Yet the little girl had been less than four years old when Burroughs left Salem Village in 1683, and she had no direct personal knowledge of him. At the same time, her statement showed that people around her who knew a great deal about the minister had discussed him at considerable length in her hearing. Those people were her parents and, most notably, Mercy Lewis, who had known him well in Falmouth and for whom the tales of Burroughs’s bewitchments “at the eastward” had a particular resonance. Indeed, the emphasis in Ann’s vision on events in Maine, especially those related to the Indian war during Sir Edmund Andros’s campaign in late 1688 and early 1689, strongly suggests Mercy Lewis’s influence on the impressionable younger girl.

In the late morning of April 21, on the road near Nathaniel Ingersoll’s tavern, Abigail Williams too saw Burroughs’s apparition. Benjamin Hutchinson, Ingersoll’s adoptive son, later attested that in his presence Parris’s niece “said that there. was a lettell black menester that Lived at Casko bay he told me so and said that he had kild 3 wifes two for himself and one for mr Losen and that he had made nine Weches in this plase and said that he Could hold out the hevest gun that Is in Casko bay with one hand which no man Can Case hold out with both hands.” Hutchinson struck with a pitchfork at the place where Abigail saw the specter, and Abigail informed him that he had torn Burroughs’s coat. About noon, inside the tavern, Abigail again saw Burroughs’s apparition, but claimed it was quickly replaced by that of a gray cat. Hutchinson thrust his rapier at the spot she pointed out. After falling into a fit, Abigail announced that Benjamin had killed the cat, but that “immedetly Sary good come and carrid hur away.”
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Like Ann’s, Abigail’s vision connected Burroughs to Casco, and to the deaths of his previous wives and of Deodat Lawson’s spouse. But it also differed from hers, in that it hearkened back to Tituba’s revelation of the existence of nine witches, attributing all of them to Burroughs’s making. It furthermore included a rudimentary physical description lacking from Ann’s: Burroughs was “lettell” and “black”—the latter a term that suggested both a swarthy complexion and a tie to the “black” Wabanakis. And it repeated a piece of gossip about Burroughs’s unusual strength, a topic that would recur in the coming months. Abigail too had heard talk about Burroughs from her elders, but talk that diverged from that heard by Ann Jr. Most notably, in the Parris household, unlike the one that contained Mercy Lewis, the bewitching of Andros’s soldiers seemingly played no part in discussions of the clergyman and his possible diabolical activities.

George Burroughs, the subject of all these conversations, was thirty-nine years old the spring of 1692. Born in Virginia, he was the son of Nathaniel Burroughs, a well-to-do English merchant who moved to Maryland, then soon returned to England. George’s mother, Rebecca, remained in America until the mid-1670s, when she left to rejoin her husband. She raised her son in Roxbury, Massachusetts, where she joined the church in 1657. George attended Harvard as a member of the class of 1670; his contemporaries there included Samuel Sewall (1671) and James Bayley (1669). By early 1673, he had married Hannah Fisher of Dedham. The first of his eventual nine surviving children by three wives was baptized at Roxbury in February 1673/4, and he joined that church a few months later. Soon thereafter he moved his small family to Casco, where to encourage him to stay as the settlement’s clergyman he was granted 200 acres of valuable land crossing Cleeves’ Neck, the peninsula lying between the Casco River and Back Cove that housed the main settlement. Yet neither then nor later was Burroughs formally ordained; he accordingly could preach to his congregations but could not baptize children or administer communion.
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Life at Casco Bay would not have been easy even before the beginning of King Philip’s War in the north in September 1675, but subsequently conditions worsened considerably. Families fought over the possession of crucial supplies of gunpowder; the town’s residents (including Philip Lewis and his brothers-in-law Thomas Cloyce and Thomas Skilling) complained of the “timorousnes and cowardize” of their militia lieutenant, George Ingersoll; and in December, Governor John Leverett of Massachusetts pronounced the entire province of Maine “much wasted,” with “houses corn & cattle most destroyed,” and “many ffamilys . . . distressed.” By April 1676 the colony’s leaders were admitting to English authorities that the settlements north of the Piscataqua, “by reason of their Remote Liveing one from another, . . . could not be preserved, but are mostly destroyed—many of the people being Slaine, and the rest retired to places of better Security.”
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One such place of security was Falmouth—at least until the attack of August 11, 1676. Then it too was largely abandoned, with many of its residents, Burroughs and his family among them, fleeing south to Essex County. He settled temporarily in Salisbury, which was the birthplace and childhood home of Ann Carr, who probably knew him there prior to her 1678 marriage to Thomas Putnam. He witnessed, and must have taken sides in, an acrimonious dispute between Salisbury’s minister, the elderly John Wheelwright, and Major Robert Pike, who disagreed vehemently with each other about a variety of matters. In 1676 their quarrel escalated, with Pike accusing Wheelwright of defamation, then trying to oust the clergyman from his pastorate; and with Wheelwright subsequently excommunicating Pike one Sabbath in early 1677 while he and his militiamen were absent responding to an alarm. The town thereupon promptly split into two factions. The Carrs sided with Pike (whose daughter had married Ann’s brother), whereas Burroughs, who served briefly as Wheelwright’s assistant, occupied the town pulpit for a time after the minister’s death in November 1679, and later associated with Wheelwright’s sons in Maine, in all likelihood supported the aged clergyman. In September 1677, a commission appointed by the Massachusetts General Court rebuked everyone involved in the affair: Pike had been “too litigious,” Wheelwright had acted with “too much precipitancy,” and the townsmen who tried to eject Wheelwright from his post had engaged in “evill practice.”
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If Burroughs ever had thoughts of succeeding Wheelwright as the leader of the Salisbury congregation, the affray (and perhaps his role in it) would have rendered that unlikely, if not altogether impossible. Accordingly, George Burroughs had to look elsewhere; and so too at the same time did Salem Village, following the less-than-amicable departure of James Bayley, its first minister. In April 1680 Villagers voted to seek a new pastor for their church, with the proviso that they hear candidates preach before committing themselves to anyone. After a tryout period of unknown duration, the Village and Burroughs reached an initial agreement in November, which was reconfirmed by both sides approximately a year later. For the first nine months of his stay in his new parish, while a parsonage was being constructed, Burroughs, his wife, and their two children lived in the house of John Putnam Sr. and his wife, Rebecca. The Putnams later testified at the minister’s trial that “all the time that said Burros did live att our house he was a very sharp man to his wife, notwithstanding our observation shee was a very good and dutifull wife to him.” The cleric’s mistreatment of his wives—like his strength—was to become a recurring theme of the discussions about him.
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In September 1681, Hannah Burroughs died, perhaps from complications following the birth of her fourth (and third surviving) child. Since the minister’s salary for his first year had not yet been completely paid (he received it two months later), John Putnam paid for the two gallons of canary wine Burroughs ordered from a Salem Town tavern for Hannah’s funeral. The following year, now ensconced in the same parsonage that would later house Samuel Parris, Burroughs married a young widow, Sarah Ruck Hathorne, whose first husband was Captain William Hathorne, the man whose troops had made possible Richard Waldron’s capture of the two hundred Wabanakis at Cocheco in September 1676. The minister’s second wife, eventually the mother of four of his children, was thus the sister-in-law of the examining magistrate, John Hathorne. Even more than the members of the Putnam and Parris households (whose talk of Burroughs’s spousal abuse led Ann Jr. and Abigail Williams to accuse him of bewitching two wives to death), Hathorne would have been aware of the persistent tales of mistreatment, some of which involved his younger brother’s widow. Reports of George’s “unkindness” to Sarah or times he “fell out with” her would certainly have reached Hathorne’s ears long before Burroughs was charged with being a witch. Indeed, the magistrates questioned the minister about at least one such story during his examination.
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