The Reverend John Hale, for one, later recalled that he had found Tituba’s confessions credible because of their consistency. Had she been lying, he thought, she would have contradicted herself. Moreover, she seemed “very penitent” for making a covenant with the devil, and she herself was afflicted by other witches for confessing. Finally, her confession “agreed exactly . . . with the accusation of the afflicted.” Others most likely concurred with Hale’s assessment. At the end of the first week of March 1691/2, therefore, the people of Salem Village and nearby towns had much to ponder and to discuss. Not least among their topics of conversation would have been new accusations. On March 3, Ann Jr. complained that Sarah Good’s young daughter Dorcas “did immediatly almost choak me and tortored me most greviously.” And three days later, during services on Sunday, March 6, she told “them that held me” that the specter of Elizabeth Bassett Proctor, the granddaughter of a woman accused of witchcraft in 1669, had choked, bitten, and pinched her three days earlier. She had seen Goody Proctor “amongst the wicthes” on March 3, Ann disclosed, but she did not recognize her until she saw her in church.
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TORMENTED YOUNG PEOPLE AND NEIGHBORING WITCHES
The events of mid-January through early March 1691/2 in Salem Village were unusual but not unprecedented in either old or New England. Ever since the final decades of the sixteenth century, similar events had occurred: daughters—and sons—of pious families would experience mysterious afflictions; physicians would eventually diagnose witchcraft; specters would be seen and suspects named; and occasionally trials would be held. Most commonly, the suspects identified were (like Sarah Good) women widely thought to be witches or (like Sarah Osborne) women from families involved in disputes with those of the accusers. The trials did not always end in conviction, but families of the tormented youths rarely if ever questioned the legitimacy of their “preternatural” afflictions, although other observers sometimes did.
Seventeenth-century authors admitted the difficulty of distinguishing between the effects of disease and the devil’s operations on the bodies of afflicted persons. The magistrates and judges in 1692 are known to have consulted a standard witchcraft reference work, the Reverend Richard Bernard’s
Guide to Grand-Jury Men,
published in England in 1627. Bernard believed that both ministers and secular authorities had adopted an overly credulous approach to witchcraft accusations, and he urged caution in reaching the conclusion that such charges were valid. In particular, he warned that because certain illnesses could mimic diabolical tortures, it was necessary to seek “the judgement of some skilfull Physician to helpe to discerne, and to make a cleere difference betweene the one and the other.” Nathaniel Crouch, a popular writer whose work was also reviewed by the magistrates in 1692, helpfully listed signs that would not appear in the case of “natural diseases.” If the afflicted could reveal “secret things past or to come,” that would occur only with “supernatural assistance.” Or if the afflicted could “speake with strange Languages” or perform feats “far beyond human strength,” those too constituted important evidence, along with an ability to talk without moving the lips. Other possible indications came from such physical signs as their bodies becoming “inflexible, neither to be bended backward nor forward with the greatest force,” or “the Belly to be suddenly puft up, & to fall instantly flat again.”
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From the late sixteenth century on, portrayals of young people’s behavior “in their fits” both accorded with such signs of diabolical activity and bore a striking resemblance to descriptions of the Essex County afflicted in 1692. For example, in the mid-1590s several youths living in the household of Nicholas Starkie howled, “fell a tumbling, and after that became speachlesse sencelesse and as deade.” Thirty years later, also in England, the daughters of Edward Fairfax “had many strange convulsions and risings in their bodies, and stiffness in their arms and hands, and whole bodies sometimes.” In Hartford, Connecticut, in 1662 a young woman named Ann Cole experienced “extremely violent bodily motions . . . , even to the hazard of her life in the apprehensions of those that saw them.” And Elizabeth Kelly, a child afflicted during the same outbreak, complained of a reputed witch that “she chokes me, she kneels on my belly, she will break my bowels, she pinches me,” and on another occasion that she “torments me she pricks me with pins.”
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A diagnosis of diabolic activity rather than disease—as occurred in the Starkie, Fairfax, and Hartford cases—did not answer every relevant question about such afflictions. Seventeenth-century authors emphasized that in all these cases the devil acted only with God’s permission. “Devils doe much mischiefe, but even by these also doth God worke his will, and these doe nothing without the hand of his providence,” observed the Reverend Mr. Bernard. “Neither Divels, nor Witches, nor wicked men, can doe any thing without the Lords leave.” Thus the occurrence of such phenomena in a household should lead its members to examine their consciences and their behavior, to bear the afflictions patiently, and to engage in fasting and prayer to discern God’s holy purpose behind their troubles. How had they offended God? Why was he testing their faith? What aspects of their lives needed reformation? Presumably the Reverend Samuel Parris and his clerical colleagues addressed those very issues during their meetings at the Salem Village parsonage in mid-February.
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A definitive verdict also required ascertaining the precise way in which Satan was creating the torments. Had the devil entered the body and soul of his target, thereby causing possession? Was the devil torturing his victim’s body but leaving the soul untouched, resulting in a different condition known as obsession? Or had the devil used one or more witches as intermediaries to effect the agonies? The Reverend Mr. Bernard sought the means to distinguish among the various diabolic manifestations. When, he declared, there was “not any suspicion at all of a Witch,” or perhaps only “an idle, vaine, and foolish suspicion, without any good ground,” then the devil probably acted directly. “Children . . . Young folkes . . . Women” were especially liable to obsession or possession by the devil, and in such cases only “the finger of God,” summoned through prayer and fasting, could cast the devil out of the victim. Bernard warned his readers against assuming that witchcraft always lay behind afflictions. The devil acting directly, or even disease, could also have caused the problem.
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When the operations of witchcraft could reasonably be inferred, there still arose the question of identifying the witch. Bernard pointed out that although witches could be of either sex, they were more likely to be women than men. Ever since Eve, Satan had preferred to deal with women, who were “more credulous” and “more malicious” when displeased than men, “and so herein more fit instruments of the Divell.” More talkative than men, women were also “lesse able to hide what they know from others” and consequently “more ready to bee teachers of Witchcraft to others,” such as their children or servants. Finally, women, “proud in their rule,” would busily command whomever they could. “And therefore,” Bernard concluded, “the Divell laboureth most to make them Witches: because they, upon every light displeasure, will set him on worke, which is what he desireth.” Above all, female or male, witches were “malicious spirits, impatient people, and full of revenge.”
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Accordingly, in cases of affliction believed to result from witchcraft Bernard listed what he termed “probabilities, as may justly cause the suspected to be questioned.” First came the propensity of the accused “to be much given to
cursing
and
imprecations,
” especially for little or no cause. If after threats, “evill [came] to happen, and this not
once,
or
twice,
to one or two, but often, and to divers persons,” then that was “a great presumption” of guilt. Another such presumption derived from “an implicit confession”—a statement by an accused that could be taken as an admission of culpability. Or perhaps the suspect had taken an inordinate interest in the afflicted person, repeatedly visiting despite being told to stay away. “The common report of neighbours of all sorts” too bore weight, particularly if the accused was “of kin to a convicted Witch,” such as a child or grandchild, sibling, niece or nephew. Similar reasoning applied as well to accused servants or people “of familiar acquaintance” with a known witch. The testimony of another witch could also be important, “for who can better discover a Witch, then [
sic
] a Witch?” Finally, if the afflicted named suspects in their fits, “and also [told] where they have been, & what they have done here or there,” or “seeme[d] to see” apparitions of the accused in their fits, “this is a great suspition.”
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But Richard Bernard warned his readers not to jump to conclusions. He identified
presumptions
only, he stressed repeatedly. Each of the grounds for suspicion could have an innocent explanation as well as a diabolic one; for example, “rude and ill-mannered people,” especially “some of the poorer sort,” might not understand that they were not wanted at the house of an afflicted person. Likewise, “a common report” could rest “upon very weake grounds.” More important, when the afflicted in their fits saw apparitions, that was, at base, “the devils testimony, who can lye, and that more often then speake truth.” Such evidence alone would be insufficient in a capital case, for even when the devil told the truth, he did so with “lying intent,” seeking “to insnare the bloud of the innocent.” Certainly, Bernard asserted, Satan “can represent a common ordinary person, man or woman unregenerate (though no Witch) to the fantasie of vaine persons, to deceive them and others.”
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At the end of the first quarter of the seventeenth century, Richard Bernard thus touched on many of the issues that later arose in cases of affliction in both old and New England. He intended to caution his readers against excessive credulity in dealing with witchcraft allegations, yet his advice could be, and was, taken in divergent ways. His reliance on doctors for the initial diagnosis of diabolic activity, for example, left little room for challenge if a physician rendered such a verdict and thus lent credibility to accusers, as Dr. Griggs did in Salem Village. Then, too, Bernard’s “presumptions,” especially those involving spectral visions, were difficult to interpret; indeed, any of the indicators he listed could be read either restrictively or expansively. A prime example lay in his treatment of the question that would eventually be of great significance in the 1692 crisis: Could Satan send the apparition of an innocent person to someone he afflicted? The apparition of
any
innocent person? Even Bernard’s careful language on that matter, quoted above, implied through omission that a regenerate (church member) innocent could not be so represented by the devil, thereby suggesting that a specter of such a person could infallibly reveal guilt. In short, despite the existence of Bernard’s lengthy treatise and other similar works, people wishing to investigate witchcraft accusations had to confront many questions for which the answers remained unclear.
Affliction stories aroused great interest among seventeenth-century clergymen and the general public, often finding their way into print. Accordingly, many published accounts of the agonies experienced by young people in the relatively recent past, and of the ways in which those torments had been handled by legal and clerical authorities, were available to the adult men and women who confronted the challenge posed by the “strange fits” of the suffering youths in Salem Village. Such narratives joined the works by authors such as Bernard in providing New Englanders with guides for handling the afflicted.
In the 1680s Increase and Cotton Mather, father and son clerics, both published compilations of witchcraft cases, most of them from New England. The books, which recounted tales of affliction and malefic bewitchment, constituted the Mathers’ contribution to a contemporary English debate over the existence and nature of witchcraft, a debate with no colonial counterpart. The Reverend Increase Mather’s
An Essay for the Recording of
Illustrious Providences
(1684) revealed to the world the story of Ann Cole and the Hartford outbreak of 1662, along with other cases such as that of John Stiles, a young Newbury boy who had fits in late 1679. Stiles, like the later Salem afflicted, complained of pinching and pricking sensations, experienced unusual bodily motions, and occasionally fell into swoons. The elder Mather also described the possession of Elizabeth Knapp, a sixteen-year-old servant of the Reverend Samuel Willard, in Groton, Massachusetts. Knapp had fits for about three months in the late fall and early winter of 1671–1672; she moved in peculiar ways, shrieked loudly, and was often struck dumb. Cotton Mather’s
Memorable Providences, Relating to Witchcrafts and Possessions
(1689) added another tale of a tormented young person, whom he identified as a boy from Tocutt (Branford), Connecticut. He had found the account (possibly thirty years old) among the papers of one of his grandfathers, Mather indicated; it again described a youth troubled for months by fits that caused him to move and speak strangely.
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The stories of Elizabeth Knapp and the Tocutt boy are useful to examine in greater detail because of their differences from the later Essex County cases. Most important, neither led to a prosecution; they were both handled entirely by ministers. Indeed, the Tocutt boy never accused anyone of bewitching him, for his was a classic instance of possession by Satan. He, the son of a “godly Minister,” carried on long conversations with the devil in his fits. Satan promised that “he should live deliciously, and have Ease, Comfort, and Money” if he would enter into a diabolic covenant. When the boy refused to succumb to such temptations, “the Devil took a corporal Possession of him,” tormented him “extremely,” and answered those who thereafter spoke to the boy, barking or hissing and sometimes voicing “horrible Blasphemies against the Name of Christ.” Elizabeth Knapp’s body (but not her soul, Samuel Willard decided) was likewise taken over by Satan, who attacked Willard as a liar and “a great black rogue.” He announced to Willard and others, “I am a pretty black boy, this is my pretty girl; I have been here a great while.” Unlike the Tocutt boy, the obsessed Knapp accused a neighbor woman of bewitching her and also admitted that she had signed the devil’s covenant. Satan cut her finger with a knife and “then took a little sharpened stick, and dipped in the blood and put it into her hand, and guided it, and she wrote her name with his help,” she recounted.
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The tormented young people of Tocutt and Groton in the 1660s and 1670s present an alternate model of seventeenth-century afflictions—of a road not followed in Salem Village. In both cases, the devil actually inhabited and spoke through the body of a possessed or obsessed person, which never happened in 1692. Furthermore, one of the young people did not accuse anyone of bewitching him. Although the other did, Samuel Willard, unlike Samuel Parris and his colleagues, did not immediately embrace the accusation. Instead, even though Elizabeth Knapp, whose eyes were “sealed up” in her fits, “knew her [the suspect witch’s] very touch from any other, though no voice were uttered,” Willard acted with careful deliberation, encouraging Knapp to pray with the suspect. Eventually, Knapp decided that “Satan had deluded her,” and her complaints of bewitchment ceased, although the fits continued. Willard also took a skeptical approach to his servant’s confession, remarking that he was not convinced she had actually agreed to a diabolic compact. Because her responses to his questions were contradictory, he regarded Elizabeth Knapp primarily as “an object of pity” and “a subject of hope” rather than as a soul lost forever to the devil.
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