In the Devil's Snare (32 page)

The final set of prosecution witnesses testified about Burroughs’s “Domestick Affairs,” proving him to be “a very ill Man” of the poor character “which had been already fastned on him,” Mather remarked. He summarized a group of testimonies about the clergyman’s “harsh Dealings” with his first wife in Salem Village and his second there and in Falmouth. The witnesses ranged from John Putnam Sr. and his wife Rebecca to former neighbors and a servant from Casco. Hannah Burroughs and her husband had fought over his request that she “give him a written covenant under her hand and Seall that shee would never reveall his secrits,” the Putnams disclosed. For her part, Sarah Ruck Hathorne Burroughs had reputedly been “affrighted” of her husband and told a neighbor she was afraid to write to tell her father how George was mistreating her. Witnesses described the widespread “common report” of strange happenings in and around the Burroughs home in Casco, such as the possible apparition of “something like a white calfe.” The clergyman had also claimed that he knew what his wife was thinking and saying about him in his absence. Once, after “Chiding” Sarah for her comments about him to her brother while the siblings were riding home together alone from strawberrying, Burroughs insisted that
“My God makes known your Thoughts unto me.”
Such stories certainly implied that George Burroughs was a witch, hinting at both knowledge gained through occult means and secrets that had to remain deeply hidden.
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All in all, Mather concluded, “never was a Prisoner more eminent” for the signs of guilt at his initial interrogation and later trial than George Burroughs. Legal experts (in this case John Gaule, although Mather did not identify him specifically) had alerted examiners to take special notice of
“faltring, faulty, unconstant, and contrary Answers”
when a suspect was questioned, and Burroughs had produced nothing but “Tergiversations, Contradictions,
and Falshoods”
in his responses. His attempts to defend himself, at least as reported by Mather, were disastrous. For example, his inability to explain the strawberrying incident suggested to the court that “by the assistance of the
Black Man,
he might put on his
Invisibility,
and in that
Fascinating Mist,
gratifie his own Jealous Humour, to hear what they said of him.” Or again, when he was offering a rejoinder to the tales about the gun, he declared “that
an
Indian
was there, and held it out at the same time.
” None of the witnesses, Mather indicated, “ever saw any such
Indian;
but they supposed the
Black
Man,
(as the Witches call the Devil; and they generally say he resembles an Indian) might give him that Assistance.”
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The clergyman also “gave in a Paper to the Jury” with a prepared argument.
⁴⁴
Burroughs had previously acknowledged that witches existed and that “the present Sufferings of the Country are the effects of
horrible Witchcrafts,
” Mather reported. Yet at his trial he advanced quite a different contention, claiming 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.”
The judges, indicated Mather, recognized the source of this assertion “as soon as they heard it” as a passage “Transcribed out of
Ady
”—that is, Thomas Ady’s
A Candle in the Dark
(1656), republished in 1661 as
A Perfect
Discovery of Witches,
which contended that contemporary English witchcraft beliefs had no scriptural basis and thus that they should be discarded.

That the court, or at least one member of it (perhaps William Stoughton?), was sufficiently familiar with the contents of Ady’s volume to immediately identify a single passage drawn from a densely argued book suggests that the justices had indeed carefully studied the witchcraft literature prior to the trials. In fact, the judges knew that literature better than Burroughs did. Questioned about his “paper,” the minister insisted that “he had taken none of it out of any Book.” Instead, he revealed that “a Gentleman gave him the Discourse in a Manuscript from whence he Transcribed it.” Thus an unidentified high-status supporter, possibly Captain Daniel King of Salem (who had previously spoken up for the clergyman), had supplied Burroughs with an argument copied from Ady’s book, but he had not told the minister its origin. Burroughs’s use of the passage then backfired as the court deemed his answer an “Evasion” and another one of his lies.

Although the minister had a few allies, he evidently was not able to supply the court with the same sorts of petitions as those that backed the Proctors or Rebecca Nurse. After his arrest, the residents of Wells did petition the Massachusetts government, but not on Burroughs’s behalf: complaining of their “destressed Condition . . . with referanc to their Spirrituall Concerns,” they merely requested “a minester to be Chaplin to the soldiers, and also minester of the Towne,” not mentioning the reason why they now lacked a resident pastor. And George Burroughs himself seems to have ultimately resigned himself to his fate. According to John Hale, even though Burroughs “denied all” and said he was convicted by “false Witnesses,” he in the end “justified the Judges and Jury in condemning of him; because there were so many positive witnesses against him.”
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THE WONDERS OF THE INVISIBLE WORLD

The day before George Burroughs’s trial, Cotton Mather delivered his major sermon on the witchcraft crisis, “A Discourse on the Wonders of the Invisible World,” which he a few months later included in his longer eponymous volume.
⁴⁶
Insisting that only those “under the Influence of the Devil ” would deny the evil angel’s existence, the younger Mather explained that “there is a sort of Arbitrary, even Military
Government,
among the
Devils.
” Likening these devils to “vast Regiments of cruel and bloody
French Dragoons,
with an
Intendant
over them, overrunning a pillaged Neighbourhood,” he also linked the
“Sooty Devils”
to the
“Swarthy Indians”
whose “
Powawes,
used all their Sorceries to molest the first Planters here” and who since “have watered our Soil with the Blood of many Hundreds of our Inhabitants.” And now, Mather proclaimed, “the
Devil
in
Great Wrath
” has made a “prodigious descent” on “our poor New-England.” Presenting himself usually as “a small
Black man,
” he “has decoy’d a fearful knot of proud, froward, ignorant, envious and malicious creatures, to list themselves in his horrid Service, by entring their Names in a
Book
by him tendred unto them.”

After describing the sufferings of the afflicted and the claims of the confessors, Mather addressed what he termed “a most agitated Controversie among us”: whether “many
innocent,
yea, and some
vertuous
persons” had been abused by the devil, who had possibly assumed their shapes to afflict others. The “
multitude
and
quality
of Persons accused of an interest in this Witchcraft” by the apparitions had raised doubts in the minds of “very many good and wise Men,” he explained, creating a “Snarled” and “dismal” question for the judges. Quite rightly, the justices had thus far employed “the
Spectral
Evidences
” to lead them to further inquiries about suspects, and they had then “by the wonderful Providence of God, been so strengthened with
other evidences,
that some of the
Witch Gang
have been fairly Executed.” But what was to be done with those accused people “against whom the
evidence
is chiefly founded in the dark world”? Mather had posed a key question, but he offered no direct answer. Instead, he suggested that New Englanders pray for guidance for the judges, and that they reform the behavior which had brought God’s wrath down upon them.

Cotton Mather thus conceded that some of the spectral identifications might be questionable, but he expressed no doubt about the validity of the confessions. Consequently, he probably watched in fascinated horror as more and more people acknowledged their involvement with Satan in the weeks that followed.

During the third session of the Court of Oyer and Terminer, afflictions, accusations, and examinations continued unabated. Mary Post (the twenty-eight-year-old daughter of the confessor Mary Tyler Post Bridges), Margaret Scott of Rowley, and Mary Johnson Clarke of Haverhill were all interrogated by the Salem magistrates while the trials were being conducted. Records for Post and Scott are no longer extant, but it is clear that Post confessed, whereas Scott (from other surviving evidence a “usual suspect”) did not. At Goodwife Clarke’s examination on August 4 in Salem Town, most of the Village afflicted had fits. Several accused her of having tormented Timothy Swan, and Warren, Walcott, and Sheldon all had pins removed from hand, arm, or neck, which they attributed to Clarke’s agency. Recent confessors, in a pattern that would become commonplace in the next six weeks, also appeared at the examination. Richard Carrier declared that Mary Clarke was among those baptized at Newbury Falls, and Mary Post insisted that “she saw this mary Clarke Spirit at the village witch meeting & that she did eat & drink There as the rest did.”
⁴⁷

Note: Includes only incidents in which dates are known.

At Clarke’s examination, Susannah Sheldon introduced a new name into the proceedings when she accused “Mr. Usher” of having thrust two pins into her hand. Hezekiah Usher Jr. was a prominent Boston merchant and book-seller whose accusation later attracted considerable attention from such critics of the trials as Thomas Brattle and Samuel Willard. Although it is difficult to discern why Sheldon accused Hezekiah Usher, he could have been a surrogate for his untouchable brother and sometime business partner John Usher, who had been Sir Edmund Andros’s treasurer and who was now the lieutenant governor of New Hampshire. Eleven years later he was to be described as “universally hated” in the province he nominally led. Although Usher’s actions as lieutenant governor after 1692 contributed to the detestation with which he was regarded by 1703, a girl like Susannah growing up in Black Point would surely have been familiar with the opprobrium attached to John Usher’s name because of his work for the hated Andros. Hezekiah himself, a member of the Third Church, was notorious for the acrimony of his marriage to the widow of a Harvard president. The marriage, indeed, had been such a failure that his wife and her daughter by her first husband left permanently for England in 1687. Although a warrant was issued for Hezekiah Usher (when is not clear), he was not sent to prison but was instead held in Boston under house arrest.
⁴⁸

Unlike Usher, the ordinary Andover men, women, and children accused in great numbers in August were immediately questioned and then jailed. Almost all of them confessed. The spiraling circle of accusations leading to confessions leading to more accusations and more confessions began on Wednesday and Thursday, August 10 and 11, when Sarah Carrier, 8, and Thomas Carrier Jr., 10, joined their older brothers in confessing to being witches and accusing their mother of recruiting them into Satan’s ranks. Sarah admitted having been a witch for two years, identified her aunt Mary Toothaker and her cousin Martha Emerson as witches also, and revealed that the previous Saturday (August 6) she had afflicted Ann Putnam Jr. and ten-year-old Sarah Phelps of Andover, in concert with a twenty-two-year-old neighbor, Betty Johnson. Sarah denied having attended a witch meeting at the Village, but her brother indicated that he had gone to one in Andover at John Chandler’s on August 9. “Their were 10 in Company with him,” including Betty Johnson, he disclosed, and they had “rid upon 2 Poles.” His mother, he confessed, had ordered him to afflict three victims.
⁴⁹

Betty Johnson (the niece of Mary Johnson Clarke and granddaughter of the Reverend Francis Dane of Andover), who was also interrogated on August 10 and 11, offered further details. She too had been recruited and baptized by Martha Carrier and had subsequently afflicted Phelps, Walcott, and Putnam, as well as others from Andover, including both Timothy Swan and Elizabeth Ballard. Unlike the younger Carriers, she had gone to a Village witch meeting—a “Mock Sacrement” with a “short” minister, George Burroughs. The witches there agreed “to afflict folk: & to pull downe the kingdom of Christ & to sett up the devils kingdom.” Among the more than seventy other witches at this meeting were Mary Toothaker and her daughter, Goody Carrier, and Captain John Floyd. Indeed, she indicated that the specters of those four witches were attending her examination, “threaten[ing] to tere her to peices” for confessing. Bringing out three poppets, two made of “rags or stripes of clothe” and the other of “birch Rhine,” she helpfully demonstrated how she had employed them to torture her many victims. She also showed the magistrates (and a group of women) where her familiar sucked her. Betty listed not only two earlier confessors as fellow witches, but also someone new: Daniel Eames of Boxford.
⁵⁰

That Thursday, the magistrates also questioned another of Betty Johnson’s aunts, the forty-year-old Abigail Dane Faulkner (Abigail’s sister, Elizabeth Dane Johnson, was Betty’s mother). Goody Faulkner refused to confess though urged to do so by her niece, and even though four young people were all tormented in her presence, then “Helped up out of their fitts” by her touch. When she was seen squeezing a cloth, the afflicted declared that “Daniell Eames & Capt Floyd was upon that cloth when it was upon the table.” Goody Faulkner ventured a defense—“she said she had looked on some of these afflicted: when they came to Andover & hurt them not”—but it went nowhere: “she was told it was before she had begun to afflict them.” Daniel Eames, 28, interrogated two days later, was equally unwilling to confess, despite apparently inflicting tortures on three sufferers and being implicated by three confessors. He insisted that when Mary Toothaker came to him in a dream he had resisted her enticement “to signe to Sattan.” At his examination the confessor Mary Post declined to name him as a witch, instead listing Margaret Scott and Rebecca Nurse as among the members of “her company.” By including them, she, like Betty Johnson (who had named Burroughs and Floyd), revealed her knowledge of events beyond the borders of Andover.
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On Friday, August 19, after a quiescent week during which only two afflictions had been recorded and two new complaints filed, the four men and one woman convicted at the third session of the court were hanged together in Salem.
⁵²
Just as people thronged the trial of George Burroughs, so many seem to have attended his execution, Thomas Brattle probably among them. Brattle wrote that “in the opinion of many unprejudiced, considerate and considerable spectatours, some of the condemned went out of the world not only with as great protestations, but also with as good shews of innocency, as men could do.” Singling out John Proctor and John Willard for special praise for their “whole management of themselves,” Brattle recounted how the convicted “forgave their accusers” and “spake without reflection on Jury and Judges” while praying “earnestly for pardon for all other sins.” All in all, he observed, they “seemed to be very sincere, upright, and sensible of their circumstances on all accounts.”

Robert Calef focused his account on Burroughs, who, he said, “made a Speech for the clearing of his Innocency, with such Solemn and Serious Expressions, as were to the Admiration of all Present.” Burroughs concluded by perfectly reciting the Lord’s Prayer, which “drew Tears from many” and raised fears that “the Spectators would hinder the Execution.” But, Calef recorded, as soon as Burroughs was “turned off” [hanged], Cotton Mather exhorted the crowd from horseback, reminding them that Burroughs was “no ordained Minister,” and pointing out that “the Devil has often been transformed into an Angel of Light.” This “did somewhat appease the People,” Calef commented, and so the executions continued.

After the death of George Burroughs, two stories circulated about events that had occurred the day before his execution. Margaret Jacobs, it was said, went to him, acknowledging that she had lied when she accused him and her grandfather. She begged Burroughs to forgive her, and he not only complied, but then prayed “with and for her.” The other tale was less benign. Several women who later confessed to being witches revealed that on the night of August 18 “there was a great meeting of the witches Nigh Sarjent Chandlers” where the minister “exhorted” them. They participated in a sacrament, and after they had finished Burroughs doffed his hat, “tooke leave & bid them Stand to their faith, & not own any thing.” When one man said he “hoped he should see him again,” Burroughs had replied that he “thout not.” Despite that reported response, Burroughs’s death did not remove him from his position as the reputed leader of the witches, for confessors continued to name him in the coming weeks.
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And afflictions continued as well, in Salem Village as well as in Andover. For example, shortly after the August executions the wife of the Villager Benjamin Hutchinson suffered severe torments. “She being in such excescive mesiry she said she beleved that she had an evell hand upon hir,” Hutchinson later reported. Therefore he consulted Mary Walcott, “one of our next neighbors,” asking her to “come and look to se if she could se any body upon hir.” Walcott immediately identified the jailed Villagers Sarah Buckley and her daughter Mary Witheridge as Goody Hutchinson’s tormentors, and she just as quickly was tortured herself, while Benjamin’s wife improved. Hutchinson then went to the sheriff to request that he “take sume course with thos women that they might not have souch power to torment.” George Corwin ordered Buckley and Witheridge to be chained, after which—Benjamin declared—Goody Hutchinson became “tolorable well.”
⁵⁴

Also following the executions, the Salem magistrates questioned Rebecca Blake Eames of Boxford, Daniel Eames’s fifty-one-year-old mother. They elicited a confession from her, but they must have found its lack of detail unsatisfactory, except for its admission that her son, too, was a witch. In sharp contrast were the confessions they obtained on August 25 and subsequently, after a group of three young female residents of Andover began complaining of torments that echoed those of the Salem Village afflicted. The fits appear to have begun on Saturday, August 20, and in the flood of confessions that resulted the magistrates must have thought they were finally uncovering the full extent of the conspiracy against New England.
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