SOME USUAL AND UNUSUAL SUSPECTS
The examinations of most of the people complained against during the previous week occurred at the Salem Village meetinghouse on Tuesday, May 31, where Bartholomew Gedney joined Hathorne and Corwin in investigating these latest witchcraft allegations. In addition to the two high-status men, the suspects interrogated included several relatives of those already jailed and women from six different towns, all of whom had long-standing reputations for maleficium. Philip English, who had finally been captured in Boston on May 30 after hiding at the home of an acquaintance for more than a month, was questioned on the 31st as well, although no record of his examination survives.
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Prominent among those accused in late May were two sisters, Mary Allen Toothaker of Billerica and Martha Allen Carrier of Andover. Martha Carrier, later termed by Cotton Mather the “Queen of Hell,” eventually became a key figure in the crisis, but Mary Toothaker, probably targeted primarily because of suspicions of her already-jailed husband Roger, aroused less concern. (Indeed, she may not have been arrested until late July, since the existing records in her case date from that period.)
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Daughters of a large and prosperous family that settled in Andover before 1662, neither Mary nor Martha married well. Roger Toothaker, though a doctor, had only a small amount of inherited property, and Thomas Carrier, Martha’s husband, was a young Welshman who fathered her first child before their marriage. Both couples lived at first in Billerica. Although Mary and Roger remained there, the Carriers moved back to Andover, probably during the late summer or early fall of 1690. Unfortunately, they appear to have carried New England’s then-raging smallpox epidemic to the town—or at least the selectmen thought they did—and town officials ordered the family quarantined lest through “wicked carelessness” they spread the disease further. But that step came too late. Ultimately, the town’s vital records attributed ten deaths to the devastating illness; the deceased included four of Martha Carrier’s own relatives. Statements by the afflicted and her neighbors showed that gossip laid three additional deaths to her charge as well, and that people in both Billerica and Andover had suspected her of malefic activity for some time.
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As had by then become commonplace, the interrogation of Martha Carrier, in front of “spectators Magistrates & others,” revolved around the statements and actions of the afflicted.
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Williams, Hubbard, Walcott, and Warren complained of spectral torments; Putnam Jr. indicated that she had been stuck with a pin; Sheldon saw “the black man”; and Lewis’s “violent fit” was cured by a touch test. Goody Carrier denied seeing any “black man,” though some of the afflicted said he was “wispering” in her ear. “You see you look upon them & they fall down,” observed Hathorne. “It is false the Devil is a liar,” Carrier retorted, and she boldly scolded the magistrate: “it is a shamefull thing that you should mind these folks that are out of their wits.”
The afflicted, exhibiting “the most intollerable out-cries & agonies,” alleged that she had “killed 13 at Andover,” claiming they saw “13 Ghosts” in the room. Finally, Samuel Parris recorded, “the Tortures of the afflicted was so great that there was no enduring of it, so that she was ordered away & to be bound hand & foot with all expedition.” As soon as that aim was effected, the afflicted had “strange & sodain ease.” And Parris added one more point that underscored the ongoing shift in power from the justices to the suffering teenagers: “Mary Walcot told the Magistrates that this woman told her she had been a witch this 40 yeares.” Evidently at the examination itself, Walcott had elicited a confession that Hathorne, Corwin, and Gedney had been powerless to obtain. The role of the afflicted in communicating with the invisible world had assumed such centrality in the legal proceedings that it was even encroaching on the magistrates’ function within the public space of the courtroom.
The other two “usual suspects” formally accused on May 28 and examined on May 31 were Wilmot Reed (or Redd) and Elizabeth Jackson Howe. At the examination of Goody Reed, the wife of a Marblehead fisherman, Lewis, Walcott, and Williams seemed especially tormented, and Elizabeth Booth made her first recorded appearance among those afflicted during an interrogation. Hubbard accused Reed of bringing her the book to sign. Employing a phrase commonly used by the Wabanakis to describe killings, she declared that Reed had threatened to “knock her in the head, if she would not write.” She and three others were cured by a touch test. Asked “what she thought these Persons ailed,” Reed responded only that they were “in a sad condition.”
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Elizabeth Howe defended herself more vigorously, probably because she had had longer and more extensive experience responding to witchcraft allegations.
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In her early to mid-fifties in 1692, Goody Howe lived with her blind husband James and their children on the family property in Topsfield near the boundary of Ipswich. Testimony offered at her trial (which will be discussed in chapter 7) revealed that she had been suspected of witchcraft for about a decade, and that the accusations had been sufficiently serious to cause the rejection of her application for membership in the Ipswich church. At Howe’s examination, Lewis and Walcott “quickly” fell into fits, and Ann Jr. “said she had hurt her three times,” displaying a pin stuck into her hand. Hathorne pressed the examinee: “Those that have confessed, they tell us they used images & pins, now tell us what you have used.” Goody Howe disavowed guilt, exclaiming, “You would have me confess that which I know not.” A touch test eased the fits of both Susannah Sheldon and John Indian, but they and others could not approach Howe on their own—they had to be carried. “What do you say to these things, they cannot come to you?” the magistrate inquired. Goody Howe could offer no explanation, and Hathorne had the last word: “That is strange that you should do these things & not be able to tell how.”
No comparable examination records survive for the two prominent men complained against on May 28, but their roles in the war in Maine unquestionably instigated the accusations. John Floyd and John Alden joined George Burroughs in the ranks of suspected witches because of the belief that they, too, were in league with the Wabanakis, the French, and the devil.
Captain John Floyd (or Flood), aged fifty-six in 1692, was possibly born in Scituate. As an adult, he lived in Lynn, then Malden, and after about 1681 in Rumney Marsh (later Chelsea, now Revere), the original home of his wife, daughter of the wealthiest man in that town. Floyd fought in both Indian wars, the first as a lieutenant. His conduct as a militia captain in the second aroused considerable criticism from both inside and outside the ranks. In early April 1689, for example, men under his command at Saco River mutinied, deserting their post and marching toward Boston, evidently in the hope of winning redress of their grievances. When he was accused in late May 1692, Captain Floyd had been home in Rumney Marsh on leave for about a month. The accusation stopped him from returning to his post. Thus the complainants (listed as “Mary Walcott, Abigail Williams & the rest”) could well have believed they had prevented him from resuming his assistance, spectral and otherwise, to New England’s enemies.
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Two incidents in Floyd’s career as a militia officer during the war appear particularly relevant to the later charge that he was a witch. In late May 1690, the governor and council dispatched Floyd and his company to defend the Piscataqua region against the attack that seemed likely after the fall of Fort Loyal earlier that month. About two weeks later, they ordered him to command sixty of the men newly raised for frontier defense, establishing a base at Portsmouth. In early July, as will be recalled from chapter 3, Captain Floyd and his men were stationed in Exeter, but left the town undefended while they sallied forth to destroy some Indian cornfields. Not only did the Wabanakis attack the town in his absence, they also assaulted Floyd and his men on their return from the sortie. During a deadly encounter at Wheelwright’s Pond, several officers and many men were killed. “Captain Floyd maintained the Fight . . . several Hours, until so many of his Tired and Wounded men Drew off, that it was time for him to Draw off also,” Cotton Mather later wrote, his choice of words downplaying the seriousness of what had happened. Floyd’s men, suffering significant casualties, had deserted him in the field of battle.
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Others then abandoned his company a few weeks later. When the captain caught up with one of the absconders in September and asked him, “whi he ded sarve me so,” the deserter replied (in Floyd’s words), “he woold sarve me woors before he had dun with me for sayd he I care nott for you nor for none and sayd that he hopt that he shoold wash his hands In my blood.” Floyd’s futile persistence on the battlefield, Mather observed, drew harsh criticism from “some that would not have continued at it so long as he.” Among those who died under John Floyd’s command appear to have been four men from Salem Village, including, significantly, Susannah Sheldon’s older brother, Godfrey.
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The second occasion involved the attack on York in January 1691/2. As was indicated in chapter 1, Floyd and his men arrived from Portsmouth too late to do more than describe the extent of the disaster. One New England diarist undoubtedly expressed an opinion shared by many when he wrote scornfully that Floyd’s troops “lay in pay at pascataq[ua], when this ruine befell York, & went After the mischiefe was don, to bury the dead.” Once again, New Englanders thought that Floyd had neglected his duty. He had effectively defended neither Exeter nor York, yet his men had nevertheless suffered terrible losses and they seemingly had no respect for his leadership. His dereliction appeared to have caused numerous deaths of fighting men and civilians. Many men and women were accused of witchcraft in 1692 for far less serious offenses than John Floyd’s.
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The actions of the other “unusual suspect” questioned on May 31 aroused just as much suspicion. Captain John Alden, son of John and Priscilla Alden, had had a long and distinguished career as a merchant and ship captain. A member of Boston’s First Church, then the Third, he was in his mid-sixties when accused in 1692. In an account of his examination he prepared about five years later at the request of Robert Calef, Alden described confronting the “jugling tricks” of the “Wenches” in Salem Village. He recounted how one accuser, probably Ann Putnam Jr., had shouted out a remarkable charge: “There stands Aldin, a bold fellow with his Hat on before the Judges, he sells Powder and Shot to the Indians and French, and lies with the Indian Squaes, and has Indian Papooses.” Neither Alden nor subsequent historians have said much about the specifics of these allegations, but upon investigation they turn out to have been well grounded in fact and widely circulated gossip.
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Under both Sir Edmund Andros and the subsequent interim government, Captain John Alden commanded the colony’s sloop
Mary
as it pursued various official errands, most of them along the coast of northern New England and Acadia. Alden’s wife, Elizabeth, the daughter of William Phillips, had inherited a share in her father’s valuable sawmills along the Saco River; accordingly, Alden had familial, professional, and public-service reasons alike for frequent trips into what became largely enemy territory after the autumn of 1688. Not surprisingly, rumors swirled around his multiple activities on the northeastern coastal frontier.
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In their influential
Salem Possessed,
Paul Boyer and Stephen Nissenbaum term Nathaniel Cary and John Alden “distant and essentially symbolic figures” to the young accusers in Salem Village. Cary may well have fit that description, but for three of the afflicted (Mercy Lewis, Susannah Sheldon, and Sarah Churchwell) and two of the confessors (Abigail and Deliverance Hobbs) Captain Alden was neither “distant” nor “symbolic.” Instead, he would have been a regular if sporadic presence in their lives in Maine. Alden, usually but not always at the helm of the
Mary,
made at least sixteen round-trips from Boston to various harbors along the northeastern coast between October 1688 and April 1692, carrying soldiers and supplies to the beleaguered frontier forts and communities. In the late summer and early fall of 1689, for example, he sailed frequently among Boston, Portsmouth, and Falmouth, ferrying the men and matériel that successfully repelled the Wabanaki attack on Falmouth in mid-September. In summer 1690, he was assigned to gather guns for the Quebec expedition, an unpopular task that aroused the Marblehead mob action described in chapter 3. And after the capture of Port Royal, he sailed often to that destination, located deep in enemy territory.
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On some of those voyages Captain Alden met with the enemy in an official capacity, arranging the release of captives or, in one case, at Sagadahoc in November 1690, negotiating the temporary truce that lasted until May 1691. At other times, however, his contacts with the French or the Wabanakis appeared less benign. During the winter of 1688–1689, for instance, at the direction of Sir Edmund Andros, Alden carried provisions to Castine at Pentagoet. A soldier later testified that he had accompanied Alden on this mission to assist a man regarded as “an enemy to the Interest of the Kings subjects & an aider & abetter of our enemies the Indians.” So much food was delivered to Castine, he complained, that “we suffered so as that for two dayes, we that were souldiers had no food allowed us although there was enough before” the delivery.
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Alden’s independent activities also lent themselves to sinister interpretations. For example, in July 1689 he visited Edward Randolph, a subordinate of Andros then being held in the Boston jail, to converse about what he had recently learned from Castine at Pentagoet; that conversation was surely overheard and gossiped about in the town. Randolph told an English correspondent that Alden “says Casteen told him that Moxas was lately returned from Canada with Supplyes,” that several warships had arrived at Quebec, and that England and France were now at war. Knowledgeable Bostonians might well have asked themselves why Captain Alden had not only met with Castine, but had then conveyed to the distrusted Andros’s imprisoned assistant the substance of the conversation. Or again, in November 1690, Alden asked for the use of the
Mary
to redeem captives in Acadia and to carry supplies to Port Royal, declaring that he wanted “to inquire into the State of the people there being subjected to the obedience of the Crown of England.” The General Court agreed to the plan, if Alden tried to return within four to six weeks and bore the expenses himself, and if—intriguingly—he did not “carry with him any amunition more then for the Necessary use of the vessell.” Alden’s similar voyage in March 1690/1 elicited like conditions, with a precise statement of how much gunpowder he could take (“one Barrel and halfe”) and with the specific injunction “You are not to Trade any Armes or Amunition.” The provisos implied that officials in Boston suspected that Alden was trading with the Indians or the French under the guise of sailing to Port Royal on colony business.
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