Quotations: Isaack Miller, Deposition, 21 December 1689,
DHSM
5:22–23. For the treaty, see chapter 3; and see
DHSM
5:321–23, his orders to redeem prisoners taken at York in January 1691/2.
Edward Randolph to Francis Nicholson, 29 July 1689, CO 5/855, f 70;
DHSM
5:159; Instructions to Captain John Alden, 7 March 1690/1, MA 39:429. Warsh, “Memories of the Eastward,” 34, first recognized the implications of Alden’s instructions.
Gedney to [Isaac Addington?] and vice versa, 12 August 1691, MA 37:115; Benjamin Allen to Massachusetts Governor and Council, 12 August 1691, ibid., 120; Isaac Woodbury et al., to Governor and Council, 26 August 1691, ibid., 124. See also ibid., 118a, 119, 121, 123.
The capture was recounted in a number of documents, but the accounts do not concur on specifics. See MA 37:176, 178, for a letter from Castine, 18 October 1691, carried to Boston by Alden, and the draft response; also CO 5/856, f 691; CO 5/1308, ff 7, 9; and M. Halsey Thomas, ed.,
The Diary of Samuel Sewall, 1674–1729
(New York, 1973), 1:282–83. For a brief discussion of the incident: Baker and Reid,
New England Knight
, 157–58.
This paragraph and the next two are based on Mark Emerson, statement, Boston, 26 October 1691, CO 5/1308, f 9; and Samuel Ravenscroft to [Francis Nicholson], 5 November 1691, ibid. That the Indians needed ammunition to kill waterfowl reconfirms the evidence cited in chapter 3 indicating that after two or three generations of European trade they had lost their familiarity with bows and arrows or other traditional methods (snares or nets) of catching ducks and geese. Emerson’s matter-of-fact mention of cannibalism is also noteworthy.
John Mack Faragher discusses the continuing trade between Boston and Acadia after the 1650s in “ ‘Without These Compromises It Would Be Impossible to Exist in This Country’: Acadian ‘Neutrality’ in the Age of Empire, 1604–1755,” unpub. paper delivered at the “Greater American Histories” conference, Huntington Library, March 2001.
See
DHSM
5:321–23, 372–74, 377–81; and Thomas, ed.,
Sewall Diary
1:289, on this trip.
SWP
3:871; Hutchinson to Isaac Addington, 19 May 1692,
DHSM
5:341. Those who registered complaints against Alden for “a long time” before 28 May were Walcott, Lewis, Williams, Putnam Jr., and Sheldon. Others listed as afflicted by him in the official complaint on 31 May were Elizabeth Booth and Mary Warren (
SWP
1:51).
SWP
1:53–54. Gedney and Alden were both among the private investors in the 1690 expedition against Port Royal; see the proposal they and others presented to the council in mid-January 1689/90, in
DHSM
5:30–31.
Newton to Addington, 31 May 1692,
SWP
3:867. Another witness to the May 31 examinations, the Rev. Henry Gibbs of Watertown, wrote in his diary that at Salem Village he had “observed remarkable and prodigious passages. . . . Wonders I saw, but how to judge and conclude, I am at a loss” (excerpted in Joseph B. Felt,
Annals of Salem
[Salem, Mass., 1827], 305).
Quotations: John Whiting,
Truth and Innocency Defended
(Boston, 1702), 140; “Touching Sir William Phips Proceedings,” [c. 24 March] 1692/3, CO 5/857, f 155. Another less specific statement referred to the accusations of “some Priest, and others accounted eminent.” See Thomas Maule,
Truth Held Forth and Maintained . . .
(n.p., 1695), 182.
DHSM
5:340–41.
CHAPTER SIX ENDEAVORS OF THE JUDGES
SWP
2:612–13, 3:756–57; 1:297–98 (23 May statements); ibid., 1:258, 2:597, 667, 688 (Williams), 2:605 (Putnams), all on 31 May. The day before, Hathorne and Corwin collected depositions describing maleficium attributed to Bridget Bishop (e.g., ibid., 1:92–94). Since the first official meeting of the new council occurred on May 24, the “order” to the magistrates must have been informal.
Newton to Addington, 31 May 1692,
SWP
3:867. The 31 May warrant for the transportation of Sarah Good, Rebecca Nurse, John Willard, John and Elizabeth Proctor, Susannah Martin, Bridget Bishop, and Alice Parker was signed by William Stoughton, chief judge (ibid., 868).
Ibid., 1:172–73. The others in the group that came to Mary Warren were Alice Parker, Ann Pudeator, Abigail Soames, and John Proctor—all people she had previously accused—and Goody Darling, whom she did not otherwise identify but who was probably Mercy Lewis’s aunt Hannah Lewis Darling, who lived in Salem Town.
Ibid., 1:103, 211–12. Quotations corrected by the original June 1 document, SWP/SJC/PEM 1:262. A daughter of John Trask’s had died in December 1687 (see
Vital Records of Beverly, Massachusetts, to the End of the Year 1849
[Topsfield, Mass., 1906], 2:580). This accusation could also have represented a further variant of the garbled charge that Bridget Bishop had killed Christian, John Trask’s wife, in June 1689.
SWP
2:600–601. The others Nurse’s specter confessed to killing were Benjamin Holton, Rebecca Sheppard, and John Fuller. For Fuller’s death, see
SVR
5:266; Holton and Sheppard both died in September 1689. Sarah Carr, Ann’s sister, was married to Thomas Baker, a Boston blacksmith.
Stoughton and Sewall, orders to George Corwin (sheriff of Essex County), 30 May 1692, Karpeles Manuscript Collection, Santa Barbara, Calif. (with thanks to Bernard Rosenthal for a copy of this recently discovered document). The twelve trial jurors’ names are known because of a retraction they later signed, which is printed in Calef,
MWIW,
in
WDNE,
3:134–35. (Krissa Swain researched their biographies for me.) Stoughton issued another summons for forty trial jurors on 31 August; that could well mean that the first forty had all either served or been challenged (
SWP
3:869–70). Whether Ruck continued as foreman of the grand jury is not clear, because later indictments did not indicate the foreman’s name. But because the 31 August summons for more trial jurors did not ask for more grand jurors, the same men probably served on that body throughout the court’s existence.
Council minutes, 27 May 1692, CO 5/785, f 90. Richard Weisman,
Witchcraft, Magic, and Religion in 17th-Century Massachusetts
(Amherst, Mass., 1984), 246 n. 66, points out that Stoughton, Gedney, and Richards had sat as judges at the witchcraft trial of Elizabeth Morse in 1681 (so too, probably, did Saltonstall). Stoughton, Gedney, and Wait Winthrop, all members of the council under Sir Edmund Andros, were probably among those who tried and convicted Goody Glover in 1688, when Joseph Dudley was chief judge.
Biographical information on Stoughton: Enders A. Robinson,
The Devil
Discovered: Salem Witchcraft 1692
(New York, 1991), 22–25, 30–32; Peter Hoffer,
The
Devil’s Disciples: Makers of the Salem Witchcraft Trials (Baltimore, 1996), 136–37;
Sibley’s Harvard Graduates
1:194–208.
Lawrence to Andros, undated petition,
DHSM
6:377–79; see also ibid., 218–19, the warrant for Lawrence’s arrest in the dispute with Davis, 4 September 1686.
Saltonstall:
Sibley’s Harvard Graduates,
2:1–8; Sewall: ibid., 345–64; Winthrop: Richard S. Dunn, Puritans and Yankees: The Winthrop Dynasty of New
England, 1630–1717
(Princeton, N.J., 1962), 191–267, passim (quotation 191).
On Richards and Sergeant, see Robinson,
Devil Discovered,
42–43, 193; on Gedney, ibid., 91, 122, 193;
York Deeds
16:223–25; and
DHSM
4:398–400, 6:222–23.
The marital relationships are conveniently summarized in Robinson,
Devil
Discovered,
218–19; and see, e.g., M. Halsey Thomas, ed.,
The Diary of Samuel
Sewall, 1674–1729
(New York, 1973), 1:109, 116–17, 130, 146, 166, 253, 272, 282, and passim.
Phips to Earl of Nottingham, 21 February 1692/3, in Burr,
Narratives,
199; Hale,
A Modest Enquiry into the Nature of Witchcraft . . .
(1702), in ibid., 415–16.
Weisman,
Witchcraft, Magic, and Religion,
12–13, explores these legal issues. See also David T. Konig,
Law and Society in Puritan Massachusetts: Essex County,
1629–1692 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1979), 158–65; and George H. Moore, “Notes on the History of Witchcraft in Massachusetts; with Illustrative Documents,”
AAS Procs,
new ser., 2 (1882–83): 162–70. On the 1692 Massachusetts witchcraft law, see chapter 8, below.
C. L’Estrange Ewen, ed. and comp., Witch Hunting and Witch Trials . . . (New York, 1929), 19–21, reprints this law (quotation, 20) and its English predecessors (13–19). “Benefit of clergy” was a general commutation of capital punishment available to men (not women) convicted of most first felony offenses.
Joseph Keble,
An Assistance to Justices of the Peace, for the Easier Performance
of their Duty
(London, 1683), 218. Cf. Michael Dalton,
The Countrey Justice . . .
(London, 1655), 341–42. John Usher’s bookstore in Boston stocked copies of Keble and Dalton in the mid-1680s; see bills of sale from 1683 and 1685 in box 4, ff 89, 91, Jeffries Family Papers, MHS. For an insightful treatment of how English writers addressed the problem of achieving legal proof of witchcraft, see Barbara J. Shapiro,
Probability and Certainty in Seventeenth-Century England: A Study of the
Relationships between Natural Science, Religion, History, Law, and Literature
(Princeton, 1983), chapter 6.
Keble,
Assistance to Justices,
218–19, and Dalton,
Countrey Justice,
342–43, differ only in some punctuation and capitalization. Yet Keble, significantly, omitted Dalton’s paragraph summarizing Bernard’s admonition that sometimes “strange diseases” could result from “natural causes” rather than witchcraft. William Perkins similarly gauged the significance of a confession; see
A Discourse of the
Damned Art of Witchcraft . . .
(Cambridge, 1608), 211–12.
Sibley’s Harvard Graduates
2:13–36. Willard later filed extensive claims for Maine lands once owned by his wife’s father; see “Book of Eastern Claims,”
MGHR
4 (1887): 109–10; 5 (1888): 37; 7 (1893): 20.
This and the next two paragraphs are based on Samuel Sewall, sermon notebook 1691–92, ff 126–29 (headed “Mr Willard. May 29. 92 PM”), Sewall Papers, MHS. Other sermons in this cycle by Willard, recorded by Sewall and another member of the congregation, are discussed later in this chapter.
This paragraph and the next three are based on Mather to Richards, 31 May 1692, in Kenneth Silverman, ed.,
Selected Letters of Cotton Mather
(Baton Rouge, La., 1971), 35–40. The witchcraft episode Mather cited was one about which he eventually wrote at length in
WIW—
that of Mora, Sweden, in 1669–1670 (see
WIW,
in
WDNE
1:211–17).
Mather also endorsed a swimming test (the folk belief that a witch, bound hand and foot and thrown into the water, would not sink), which Keble and Dalton did not. Nearly a century earlier, William Perkins, in
Discourse of Damned Art,
208, had already rejected the swimming test. No Salem suspect in 1692 was “swum,” but the accused Connecticut witches that year were more than once subjected to the ordeal; see David D. Hall, ed.,
Witch-Hunting in Seventeenth-Century New England,
2d ed. (Boston, 1999), 321, 326.
SWP
3:868–69 (oaths of office); ibid., 2:591–92 (summons for Nurse witnesses) ; ibid., 2:681 (physical examination of Willard and Proctor). The summons for Willard witnesses is not extant, but several testified to the grand jury on June 3 (see
SWP
3:839–41, 852). For a good general discussion of trial procedures in 1692, see Hoffer, Devil’s Disciples, chapter 7, passim.
“Jury of Womens Return,”
SWP
1:106–108. Dr. Barton, born in England, moved to Salem in 1676; he died in Barbados in 1694 (Sidney Perley,
The History of
Salem, Massachusetts
[Salem, Mass., 1928], 3:100).
This paragraph and the next are based on
SWP
1:87–91 (quotation 87); Calef,
MWIW,
in
WDNE
3:76. On the need for two witnesses, see Perkins,
Discourse of Damned Art,
213–14. See
SWP
1:89 for what appears to be a list of the grand-jury witnesses in this case. Ewen, ed.,
Witch Hunting,
77–93, reprints many examples of contemporary English witchcraft indictments.
This paragraph and the next two are based on Mather,
WIW,
in
WDNE
1:163–66. Although Mather did not give the name of the afflicted girl who claimed to have been carried off, it was probably Susannah Sheldon, who at other times made similar charges. He also did not name her as the one who testified about the spectral encounter, but her deposition survives (and is the source of the last quotation in the first paragraph) (
SWP
1:104). For the case against Bridget Bishop and a detailed discussion of the confusion that has been caused by the inclusion of some evidence against Sarah Bishop in the documents in Bridget Bishop’s case in
SWP,
see Bernard Rosenthal,
Salem Story: Reading the Witch Trials of 1692
(New York, 1993), chapter 4. As in the quotation in this paragraph, Mather continually interspersed his personal opinions with his summaries of the cases he included in
WIW,
but where the original documents survive it is clear that he summarized them essentially accurately. Because he knew that his accounts of the trials would be read by people who had witnessed the proceedings, he would not have significantly falsified or misrepresented what happened in the courtroom, for fear of having the validity of his book rejected by its intended audience.
Quotations:
SWP
1:101; Mather,
WIW,
in
WDNE
1:173. For a deposition with an especially clear account of how someone like Bridget Bishop came to be seen as a witch, see
SWP
1:97–99. See, generally, ibid., 1:92–95, 97, 104–105, for these depositions; Mather’s summary of them is in
WIW,
in
WDNE
1:167–73. Robert Calef revealed that Samuel Gray, one of the witnesses, later withdrew his accusations on his deathbed, insisting that they were “groundless” (
MWIW,
in
WDNE
3:30).