here is Just now two men, that were taken on Monday sevennight by a Small open Sloope . . . & ware caryed in to a place a little East of Penobscot. . . . Say there Captain that toke them, tels them, the ffrench General or Comander that was at the takeing of Casco fforte, was com in to that place from St Johns, (they saw him, he came in a Small biscan Shalop) Enformes he was bound to Castene to See what Strength he could raise to Joyne him & his fforces to com against Pescataque, one of these men Say the Captain Tould him the ffrench & Indians difer about the way of their coming, the ffrench are for coming by water, the Indians for coming by land, the other Saith that the Captain tould him they intended to com by Land: And Saith there is a ship of Thirty or 36 guns with three hundred men & two Small Vesels arived from ffrance at St Johns & is going to Port royal. . . . Say that Castene had been at the port whence they came the morning before they came there Exspecting to find goods there which he Sayd Captain Alden owes him & promist to leave there, but finding none threatens what he will do when he meets him againe.
CHAPTER SIX
Endeavors of the Judges
MAY 27–JULY 20, 1692
WITH THE ESTABLISHMENT of the Court of Oyer and Terminer on May 27, the witchcraft crisis moved into a new phase. Hitherto John Hathorne and Jonathan Corwin had handled most of the examinations, with occasional assists from Bartholomew Gedney, Samuel Sewall, and Thomas Danforth. Now grand and petty juries composed of Essex County men and a large panel of distinguished judges would assess the validity of the evidence the justices of the peace had gathered, and would determine the ultimate fate of the many people accused, arrested, and jailed. The court would begin its first session on June 2, but that could not happen without considerable preliminary work. Jurors had to be summoned, witnesses and confessors reinterviewed, and depositions collected. The primary responsibility for many of those tasks still fell on Hathorne and Corwin, as the men most familiar with the evidence unearthed so far. Thomas Newton, the prosecutor, also had to decide whom to try first and how to present his case most effectively to the grand and petty juries. The court had no predetermined schedule, so much would depend on the success of the first prosecutions.
PREPARING FOR THE TRIALS
In late May, while they continued interrogating new suspects in Salem Village, Hathorne and Corwin also began preparing for the first formal proceedings against those who had been accused much earlier. On May 23, by “order of the Governor & Councill,” they took sworn statements from Abigail Williams, and from Samuel Parris, Thomas Putnam, and Ezekiel Cheever against the first three accused witches: Tituba, Sarah Good, and Sarah Osborne (the latter even though she had died about two weeks previously). They also recorded several testimonies about the recent afflictions attributed to Mary Easty. Eight days later, on May 31, Abigail offered further detailed depositions against Elizabeth and John Proctor, Martha Corey, and Rebecca Nurse. That same Tuesday, Ann Carr Putnam swore to the truth of her earlier statements concerning the tortures visited upon her by the apparitions of Goody Corey and Goody Nurse between the 18th and 23rd of March. She also attested that at the very time she was listening to the magistrates reread her testimony, “I was again re-assaulted & tortured by my before mentioned Tormentor Rebekah Nurse.” Her daughter, present in the room, swore that she had seen not only Goody Nurse’s specter but also those of Martha Corey and Sarah Cloyce attacking her mother.
1
For his part, Thomas Newton sent directions to Boston to transport eight of the prisoners to Salem Town, although he observed that “I fear we shall not this weeke try all that we have sent for, by reason the tryalls will be tedious, & the afflicted persons cannot readily give their testimonyes, being struck dumb & senceless for a season at the name of the accused.” He also ordered that Tituba and “Mrs Thatchers maid” (most likely Mercy Short) “be transferred as Evidences but desire they may not come amongst the prisoners but rather by themselves.” And he asked that the records of Bridget Oliver Bishop’s trial for witchcraft before the Court of Assistants in February 1679/80 be dispatched to Salem as well.
2
The next day, June 1, Hathorne and Corwin once more examined most of the confessors being held in the Salem Town prison, attempting to put them on record again before they might be called to testify in a court proceeding. Questioning Abigail and Deliverance Hobbs, Mary Warren, and Sarah Churchwell brought the magistrates confirmation of continued spectral activity, especially by George Burroughs. Abigail confessed to having seen Burroughs, Bridget Bishop, Good, Osborne, and Giles Corey “at the generall meeting of the Witches in the feild near Mr Parrisse’s house.” She also charged that two or three nights previously Burroughs’s specter “came & sat at the window & told her he would terribly afflict her for saying so much against him.” Her stepmother accused the minister of recently having “almost shooke her to pieces” because she would not sign his book. Mary Warren’s contribution to their joint statement revealed that about two weeks earlier a large group of apparitions headed by Burroughs, who “had a trumpett & sounded itt,” had invited her to “a feast at Mr parrisses.” Goody Nurse and Goody Proctor told her they were “Deacons” and “would have had her eat some of their sweet bread & wine,” but she had refused and as a consequence they “dreadfully afflicted her at that tyme.” The magistrates noted at the bottom of the page that while they were taking these sworn statements Nurse’s apparition came to afflict all three deponents and that “Mr English then run a pin into Maryes hand as she attested.”
3
Hathorne and Corwin recorded another, separate statement from Warren that Wednesday. In it, she focused on Bridget Bishop, whose specter, she claimed, had appeared repeatedly to torment her and to ask her to sign the book. Even though Goody Bishop could not torture Mary directly, “being in Chanies” in prison, she had brought another apparition with her to do so, “which now she knowes to be Mrs Cary.” (Presumably, these torments had occurred before Mistress Elizabeth Cary was herself jailed and chained on May 24.) The magistrates transcribed Sarah Churchwell’s second confession, also dated June 1, on the other side of the same piece of paper. In addition to her master, Sarah accused Ann Pudeator and Bridget Bishop. Goody Bishop, she said, had admitted killing “John Trask’s Child.” And Sarah herself admitted having used “Images” brought by Goody Pudeator to torture Mercy Lewis, Ann Putnam Jr., and Betty Hubbard. Pudeator had assured her that “the persons whose likeness they were, would be afflected,” so she had taken thorns and “stuck them in the Images.” (Some time later, regretting this confession, Sarah declared that she had “undon hur self” because she was threatened with being thrown into the “dungin” with “mr Borows” if she did not confess.)
4
On that same June 1, Ann Carr Putnam, who had been free from torments between late March and the previous day, again suffered greatly at the hands of the apparition of Rebecca Nurse. The specter “tould me that now she was come out of prison she had power to afflet me,” Ann declared. Goody Nurse’s apparition, back in Salem Village with Nurse herself, threatened to murder her and acknowledged killing several Villagers, among them “young John Putnams Child.” Ann Sr. also saw a frightening vision of “six children in winding sheets” who revealed themselves to be the offspring of her sister Sarah Carr Baker, alleging that they had been killed by Rebecca Nurse, Mistress Elizabeth Cary, and “an old deaf woman att Boston [Margaret Thacher?].” They directed Ann to transmit their accusation to the magistrates, “or elce they would tare me to peaces for their blood did crie for vengance.” Ann further was visited by the specter of “my own sister Bayley and three of hir children in winding sheets,” who informed her that Rebecca Nurse had murdered them as well.
5
All the activity in the invisible world during the last few days of May and the first day of June was clearly linked to the imminent convening of the Court of Oyer and Terminer. On May 30, William Stoughton and Samuel Sewall issued a call for jurors—eighteen “honest and lawfull men” for the grand jury, and forty more “Eligbel alike” for juries of trials, the larger number of the latter allowing both for the possibility of multiple juries and for potential challenges to jurors by defendants. How many of the forty men summoned on May 30 actually served on trial juries in June or later is not clear, but twelve of the men who heard cases in the Court of Oyer and Terminer can be identified. They came from Wenham, Topsfield, Ipswich, Boxford, and Beverly; most had prior experience as jurors in the county, and some had been town officeholders. The foreman, Captain Thomas Fiske, a sixty-year-old Wenham selectman, had fought in King Philip’s War under the command of Richard Waldron. John Ruck of Salem Town, the wealthy father of George Burroughs’s second wife, served as foreman of the grand jury for at least the first court session in early June.
6
Precisely which members of the Court of Oyer and Terminer were present at the first or later trials is unknown, since the official records of the sessions are no longer extant. The council’s order setting up the court on May 27 named nine judges, all of whom were also councilors: William Stoughton, John Hathorne, Jonathan Corwin, Samuel Sewall, Bartholomew Gedney, John Richards, Nathaniel Saltonstall, Waitstill Winthrop, and Peter Sergeant. Five of these men would constitute a quorum, as long as one of the five was Stoughton, Gedney, or Richards. Collectively, the justices had many years of political and judicial experience. Several, indeed, had served as judges on the Court of Assistants during previous witchcraft trials.
7
William Stoughton, the lieutenant governor and chief judge, who was about sixty-one in 1692, had graduated from Harvard with the class of 1650. Originally planning to enter the ministry, he studied at Oxford and preached in Sussex, but returned to Massachusetts in 1662, thereafter entering public life. First elected an assistant in 1671, he retained his positions as councilor and judge under various regimes until the deposing of Andros in April 1689. Even though he then lost his position on the council because he was regarded as too closely aligned with the ousted governor, the interim council selected him as one of its two emissaries to New York in spring 1690 to plan the joint expedition against Montreal. His friendship with the Mathers earned him the lieutenant governor’s post under the new charter.
8
Greatly respected for his knowledge of both theology and law, Stoughton could be rigid and imperious, traits that he exhibited during the Salem trials and which he had also displayed in earlier court appearances. A sense of how he conducted himself during legal proceedings can be gained from a petition submitted by Falmouth’s Robert Lawrence to Governor Andros, probably in 1687. Stoughton had presided over a court session in Maine that was scheduled to adjudicate one aspect of the long-standing dispute between Lawrence and Sylvanus Davis. But instead of hearing that case, Stoughton called Lawrence to task for defaming Davis’s ally Edward Tyng, a council member, as a “Hipocriticall Rogue.” Lawrence admitted employing the phrase, but defended himself by arguing that at the time of the slander Tyng had not yet become a councilor, and so “I thought I stood upon as Good Ground as mr Ting.” Moreover, Tyng had “afterwards . . . past by & forgotten” the offending words. But, Lawrence reported, “Mr Stoughton tould mee Capt Ting had noe power to pass by such an affront with divers other words in setting out the hainousnesse off so great A Crime as hee termed it not suffering mee to speake for my selfe & as I saw being resolved to Condem me I was forced to be silent.” After denying Lawrence an attorney, Stoughton fined him a substantial amount. That picture of a man certain of his judgments and unwilling to entertain any opposition is confirmed by every fragment of surviving evidence about the chief justice’s conduct during the witchcraft trials.
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While not so learned as Stoughton, two other judges had also graduated from Harvard: Nathaniel Saltonstall (class of 1659), and, as already indicated, Samuel Sewall (class of 1671). Saltonstall, of Haverhill, was the grandson of one of the Bay Colony’s first leaders. A militia officer for Essex County first chosen in 1666, a justice of the peace after 1669, and an assistant from 1679 until 1686 as well as a member of the interim council after April 1689, Saltonstall had had a great deal of experience in military and judicial affairs at both local and colony-wide levels. Sewall, a man of more modest origins, embarked upon a career in the ministry after college, but his marriage in early 1676 pulled him instead into the orbit of his new father-in-law, the wealthy merchant and mintmaster John Hull. Thereafter Sewall engaged in commerce, also serving as a militia officer and eventually as an assistant during the last three years of the old charter and its resurrection in 1690–1691. A third judge, Wait Winthrop, attended Harvard for two years but did not graduate. Wait and his brother, the colonial military leader Fitz-John— grandsons of John Winthrop, the longtime governor of Massachusetts, and sons of John Jr., governor of Connecticut—have accurately been termed “men of ordinary talent, lacking their grandfather’s driving moral purpose and their father’s breadth and creative intelligence.” Both Wait and his brother sat on the council under Andros, but Wait nevertheless took an active role in Andros’s overthrow, thereafter serving as a councilor under the interim government.
10
The other judges were, like Sewall, wealthy merchants. John Richards, a member of the Mathers’ Second Church, was a major in the militia first elected an assistant in 1680. Peter Sergeant, like Sewall a well-to-do member of the Third Church, helped to oust Andros in April 1689. And Bartholomew Gedney, the Salem magistrate who occasionally joined Hathorne and Corwin in questioning suspected witches, owned a wharf and a shipyard in Salem Town. A prominent speculator in Maine lands, he possessed valuable mills at North Yarmouth (in the northern reaches of Casco Bay). He had served as an assistant in the 1680s, under both the old charter and the Dominion of New England, and he was an experienced justice of the peace.
11
The judges of the Court of Oyer and Terminer were no strangers to each other. Not only had many of them served together as councilors or militia officers, they were also linked by an intricate web of marital relationships. As has already been noted, Corwin’s sister had been married to Hathorne’s now-deceased brother. One of Wait Winthrop’s sisters was married to Corwin’s brother; another of his sisters wed the widower John Richards during the trials. George Corwin, the nephew of both Wait Winthrop and Jonathan Corwin, served as sheriff of Essex County in 1692; his wife Lydia was Gedney’s daughter. Only Stoughton (a bachelor), Sergeant, and Sewall stood outside this tightly related circle, but the latter two were connected to Winthrop in another way, through their common membership in the Third Church. Moreover, Sewall’s diary entries demonstrate that Stoughton was among his closest associates in the 1680s; that he also socialized frequently in Boston with Richards, Winthrop, and Sergeant; and that when in Salem he would call on both Gedney and Hathorne.
12
Sir William Phips later described these men collectively as “persons of the best prudence and figure that could then be pitched upon,” declaring that he had depended on them for “a right method of proceeding in cases of witchcraft.” According to John Hale, the justices “showed a conscientious endeavour to do the thing that was right,” and, despite their past experience in witchcraft cases, they systematically “consulted the Presidents [precedents] of former times and precepts laid down by Learned Writers about Witchcraft.” Hale noted specifically that the judges had familiarized themselves with two important treatises—Richard Bernard’s
Guide to Grand-Jury Men
and Joseph Keble’s chapter on “Conjuration” in his book on the common law—along with the more general works on witchcraft discussed in chapter 1.
13
What law, exactly, was the court applying? When the old charter was revoked in 1684, with it died the 1648
Laws and Liberties,
which criminalized conjuring with “a familiar spirit.” In 1688, during the Dominion of New England, the trial of Goody Glover was presumably conducted under prevailing English law, a witchcraft statute passed by Parliament in 1604. Between April 1689 and May 1692, Massachusetts courts might possibly have reverted to enforcing the 1648 statutes, but under the charter of 1691 another legal code would have to be adopted. In mid-June, the first session of the new assembly voted to continue all laws then in force until its second session in the fall; at that time—after the Court of Oyer and Terminer had been dissolved—it formally adopted the 1604 English law almost word for word (with a significant exception that will be considered later). In all likelihood, then, the judges of the Court of Oyer and Terminer thought of themselves as applying existing English law. As shall be seen below, indictments in 1692 frequently employed the exact language of the 1604 statute. Thus the judges would have been particularly interested in the information contained in the volumes by Bernard and Keble, as well as the ubiquitous, all-purpose legal reference, Michael Dalton’s
The Countrey Justice,
which went through multiple editions during the seventeenth century after its first publication in 1618.
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