As time passes, the Goodwin children will gradually recover their normal lives (and selves). And Cotton Mather will turn from hands-on work with witchcraft victims to writing and publishing about them instead. His book
Memorable Providences, Relating to Witchcrafts and Possessions
appears just months later. (He is a prodigiously fluent and prolific writer. The list of his published work will eventually swell to 383 different titles.)
Memorable Providences
includes a long account of the Goodwin case and a careful description of Mather's own part in it. Significantly, young Martha's second accusation is mentioned only briefly and without specific detail. Mather's goal is not, after all, to encourage or instigate projects of witch-hunting. Instead, he aims to refute, from “my own ocular observation,” those who would “deny . . . the being of Angels either good or evil.” “Go tell Mankind that there are Devils and Witches,” he writes in an oddly triumphant tone. “Go tell the world what prayers can do beyond all devils and witches.”
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The years immediately following the Goodwin case found Mather involved on many fronts simultaneously. Not yet out of his 20s, he was responsible both for his own growing household and for that of his absent father; he was leader of the largest church congregation in Massachusetts; and he was public champion, spokesman, and strategist for the colony's revamped administration. (He would quickly emerge as a close confidante of the incoming governor, Sir William Phips.) His days were filled with pastoral visits, composing and delivering sermons, writing and publishing tracts and books on subjects both spiritual and secularâall mixed with his regular round of private meditations and everyday familial cares. Sometimes it seemed almost too much for him, and a petulant edge began to emerge in his dealings with the world around him. He might complain in his diary about “the calumnies of the people against poor me” or “the spirit of lying that prevails so generally around us.”
But his most urgent preoccupation was still the approach of the new millennium. Growing signs of “blessedness” on the one hand and of imminent disaster on the other pointed equally in the same direction. During the unusually harsh winter of 1691-92 he felt certain that the Last Judgment was “at the door.” Indeed: “I do, without any hesitation, venture to say âthe great day of the Lord is near . . . and it hastens greatly.' ” At such a time a new outbreak of witchcraft, on a scale unprecedented for New England, would not seem altogether surprising. That, too, might well be a forerunner of apocalyptic change.
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Cotton Mather's participation in the Salem witch-hunt will be mostly indirect, inherently complex, painfully conflictedâand undeniably important. He does not attend any of the actual trials; instead he follows their course as closely as he can from his base in Boston. To be sure, he is notoriously present on that crucial occasion when five convicts, including Reverend Burroughs, are executed in August; otherwise he does not visit Salem during the entire year of 1692.
Certainly, he has good correspondentsâsuch as Stephen Sewall, clerk of the Court of Oyer and Terminerâto supply him with regular reports from, and about, the scene of the action. And he is not reluctant to offer his opinions in return. In April he delivers (and then publishes) a powerful sermon entitled
A Midnight Cry,
stressing the convergence of recent and current “calamities,” including attack by devils. A short while later, he proposes a personal intervention in the Salem affair. He would have several of the “afflicted girls” brought to his own home for close-up pastoral supervision, just as he had done with Martha Goodwin. Does he imagine that he might thereby close off the rapidly deepening vortex of public accusation? After all, he has succeeded before. No matterâfor this time his offer is not accepted.
In May he composes a long letter of advice to one of the trial judges. His chief aim is to discourage undue reliance on spectral evidence, since “it is very certain that the devils have sometimes represented the shapes of persons not only innocent but also very virtuous.” Should such testimony be allowed, “a door may be . . . opened for the devils . . . to proceed with the most hideous desolations upon the repute and repose” of perfectly upstanding citizens. He believes that only “a credible confession” can provide a clear and solid basis for establishing guilt. At the same time he condones harsh prosecutorial tactics: for example, the use of “cross and swift questions” and forced body searches for “witch-marks.” Moreover, he will not impeach the trials as a whole. “The business thus managed,” he writes, “may not be called imaginary. The effects are dreadfully real. Our dear neighbors are most really tormented.”
The same divided attitude will inform other Mather writings in the months to come. When, in mid-June, leading Boston clergymen are asked for counsel on trial procedure, Mather becomes the author of their written response. This is the (previously noted) “Return of Several Ministers,” which emphatically disapproves “things received only upon the Devil's authority”âin short, spectral evidenceâand urges “exceeding tenderness towards those that may be complained of .” Retreating somewhat from Mather's previous endorsement of harassing interrogations, the “Return” also argues against allowing “such noise, company, and openness as may too hastily expose” the accused. Furthermore, touch tests and similar “experiments” must be firmly excluded as “liable to be abused by the Devil's legerdemains.”
These cautions take Mather and his colleagues almost to the end of their chosen agenda. If they stop there, the “Return” might serve to check the momentum of prosecutionâand be hailed later on as an admirably liberal statement. But they don't stop there. Instead they declare, in conclusion: “We cannot but humbly recommend unto the government the speedy and vigorous prosecution of such as have rendered themselves obnoxious, according to the direction given in the laws of God and the wholesome statutes of the English nation for the detection of witchcraft.” Here is a ministerial license for the court to continue as before.
Mather will reiterate both his concerns about procedure and his general approval of the witch-hunt in additional comments made through the remainder of the summer. At one point he suggests a moderating tactic: the use of banishmentâinstead of trial, conviction, and capital punishmentâfor persons who may have been “innocently” represented by specters. (He even volunteers to accept such a fate for himself, should he too be implicated that way.) At the same time, he repeatedly and strenuously summons the faithful to uncompromising struggle against the Devil's “infernal” designs.
In August his father publishes yet another cautionary work,
Cases of Conscience, Concerning Evil Spirits Personating Men,
with the strongest critique yet of spectral evidence. Fourteen ministers sign a preface of endorsementâbut Cotton Mather is not among them. His own focus has shifted by now. He is racing to complete his witchcraft apologia; its full title is
The Wonders of the Invisible World: Observations, as Well Historical as Theological, Upon the Nature, the Number, and the Operations of Devils
. This work, suggested by “the direction of His Excellency, the Governor,” and stitched together at intervals between the beginning of June and the end of September, will become one of Mather's best-known writings and the chief basis in subsequent years for assessing his involvement with witch-hunting.
The immediate context is a surge of public opposition to the trials;
Wonders
is Mather's response. In it he assembles a broad range of affirmative materials, including two of his own recent sermons, accounts of witchcraft cases from overseas, some scattered reportage on “enchantments and apparitions,” and finallyâat its heartâdetailed summaries of the trial proceedings against five “of the principal witches that have been condemned” at Salem. Doubts about spectral evidence do not appear; the central theme is other, presumably more credible, means of “discovering” and convicting the guilty. Indeed, Mather never wavers from a goal he announces at the start: “to countermine the whole plot of the Devil against New England, in every branch of it.” Taken in its entirety, the book is nothing less than a full-throated vindication of the work of the Salem judgesâwhose leader, William Stoughton, is moved to contribute for the front matter a
fulsome letter of “thankfulness to you for so great pains, and . . . [ for your] singular approbation.”
Even as Mather is completing this text, showing it to colleagues, and packing it off to the printer, he finds himself suddenly face-to-face with another living specimen of witchcraft. Mercy Short, a girl of 17, recently arrived in Boston from the Maine frontier where she had been for a time a captive of Indians, begins in the summer of 1692 to show the unmistakable signs of “affliction.” The link to concurrent events in Salem is direct; Sarah Good, one of the convicted witches there, is being temporarily held at the jail in Boston, where Mercy encounters her in the course of an errand. The two of them exchange “ill words,” following which Mercy is “taken with just such . . . fits as those that held the bewitched people in the county of Essex.” Thus begin months of tormentâand notorietyâfor this latest young victim. Her fits run the usual gamut, from “swooning” (fainting episodes), to “fasting” (inability to eat), to many sorts of physical hurt (pinches, pricks, sensations of “burning” and “roasting,” forced ingestion of poisonous liquids), all at the hands of a vividly personified Devil and a host of his spectral “confederates.”
Mather is nearby, and eager to take charge. For him this is another chance to demonstrate the correct way of responding to such “assaults.” (To that end he will record the entire performance in a carefully-kept journal, for the benefit of posterity.) The gist of his treatment approach, as in the Goodwin case, is sustained prayer and fasting. Indeed, this becomes a community-wide project, involving several different ministers and numerous “pious people in the north part of Boston.” Mather's personal attentions to Mercy remain foremost, however; she is in and out of his house and church on a regular basis. He endures, as a result, not only the recurrent “spectacle” of her sufferings but also her occasional “insolent and abusive . . . frolics”; at some points, she seems “as extravagant as a wildcat.” Then, after four months, her assailants suddenly vanish, affording her a “complete deliverance.” And Mather feels a rush of triumph. As he will later write in his diary, “I had the satisfaction of seeing her . . . so brought home unto the Lord that she was admitted unto our church.” His accomplishment extends also to “many other . . . young people [who are]
awakened by the picture of Hell exhibited in her sufferings, to flee from the wrath to come.”
Through it all Mather maintains his principle of discretion about the identity of the witches supposedly involved. Several of the attacking specters take “the shape of [actual persons] . . . who are doubtless innocent as to the crime of witchcraft”âwhile others represent “as dangerous and damnable witches as ever there were in the world.” The problem lies in deciding who is who (or which is witch!); just there the Devil's “legerdemains” prove impossible to sort out. “For my part, I did all I could that not so much as the name of any one good person in the world might suffer the least ill report on this occasion”: herewith a centerpiece of Mather's “example” to other witch-hunters in Boston, at Salem, everywhere.
If his work with Mercy Short seems a triumph, a similar experience just a few months later will prove the exact opposite. It begins when another young woman “in the north part of Boston,” named Margaret Rule, falls into “odd fits” that quickly blossom into “an affliction . . . marvelously resembling” that of Short. There are pinchings, prickings, force-fed poisons, and “exorbitant convulsions,” inflicted once again by the Devil and a group of “cruel specters.” Mather's response, as he will describe it in yet another journal, is just as before: prayer and fasting, and an absolute determination “to prevent the excessive credit of spectral accusations.” (He will claim later to have explicitly “charged the afflicted that they should cry out of nobody for afflicting 'em.”)
The difference this time is a growing public skepticism about all these “sufferers”âand about Mather's personal efforts of exorcism. The lead is taken by Robert Calef, a local cloth merchant who has visited Margaret Rule while she lay “under affliction” in Mather's careâand who then writes a highly critical account of what he observed. According to Calef the victim was repeatedly drawn into giving a set of coached responses and indulged in “merry” behaviors, while the minister “rubbed her stomach, her breast not covered with the bed clothes.” (This intimation of sexual impropriety is especially wounding.) Mather is appalledâand outragedâthat “a sort of Sadducee in this town . . . hath written a volume of invented and notorious lies” about him. But Calef is not, evidently, alone in his opinions.
When Mather vents his deep resentment in the privacy of his diary, he speaks of “this unworthy, ungodly, ungrateful people” and the “hard representations some ill men [note plural usage] have given my conduct.” He and Calef exchange hotly-phrased letters, and Mather begins a lawsuit for libel (which he will subsequently drop). Calef's book is published in London some years later; its title,
More Wonders of the Invisible World
, mockingly riffs Mather's own work.
All of which leaves Mather feeling bitter and bruised, and more than a little self-pitying. In writing about the Rule case he defends “all my unwearied cares and pains to rescue the miserable from the lions and bears of Hell,” and compares the “danger attending me” to a trek of “ten thousand steps over a rocky mountain filled with rattlesnakes.”