The Witches: Salem, 1692 Part 8

As quickly as Cotton Mather had worked, Wonders of the Invisible World arrived as a case of too much too late. Conceived as a justification, published to prevent false reports, the pages read as a full-throated apologia. Between mid-September and mid-October-as Phips weighed disbanding the court, or weighed breaking the news that he had disbanded the court-the churning tide had turned. There was another problem as well. Where the father had no taste for the trials, the son appeared to urge them on. Cotton Mather worried less about condemning an innocent than about allowing a witch to walk free. He found himself under immediate fire, not only for his fawning embrace of the court but for an adolescent infraction to which New England was particularly sensitive: filial disrespect. He had not endorsed his father's volume; he undermined his position. Among all the freewheeling accusations in 1692, not once had a father accused a son or a son implicated a father. "With what sinful and raging asperity I have been since treated, I had rather forget than relate," Mather wailed, days after the publication of Wonders. A cataract of "unkindness, abuse, and reproach" roared his way. People said lovely things to his face and hideous things behind his back. He had meant only to tamp down dissent at a critical time! How could he be said to oppose his father and the rest of the New England ministry when his critics were themselves madly impaling one another? He could see little to do but die. (He was twenty-nine.) As he explained it, the two had made a concerted effort to cover all bases. Cotton Mather had worried that Cases on its own would undermine the court and "everlastingly stifle any further proceedings of justice." He dreaded an open attack on the magistrates, whose work might expose them to "the rashest mobs." (He added the "rashest" afterward, for emphasis.) Father and son shared the Second Church pulpit. They saw each other daily and collaborated closely. Earlier, from opposite sides of the Atlantic, they had worked in concert to justify a coup, one man urging moderation on the restless colony, the other playing for sympathy in the mother country; they were unlikely to have forgotten their careful ch.o.r.eography now. More plausibly Cotton Mather felt the two books to be logical extensions of the same equivocal statement. "The Return of Several Ministers" was nothing if not elastic, a doc.u.ment that simultaneously extended goodwill to the court and mercy to the accused. Increase's Cases became the plea for "exquisite caution"; Cotton's Wonders the overgrown "nevertheless."* As Mather saw it, he made a case for prosecuting the guilty, his father for protecting the innocent. Were they not saying the same thing?

Wonders was published under what Mather felt was Stoughton's protection. It proved insufficient. His father rode to the rescue; the Phips administration could ill afford a rift at this juncture. As his pages went to press and probably hours before they did so, Increase Mather appended a backtracking postscript to Cases, to bring the two books into closer alignment. He may have heard from Stoughton personally. The elder Mather remained fully convinced that witches roamed the land; the confessions he had heard while visiting the imprisoned confirmed as much. He meant not to deny witchcraft, only to make its prosecution more exact. Nor did he intend to cast aspersions on the ever-worthy justices. They deserved "pity and prayers rather than censure." He was most grateful to his son for having established that no one had been convicted on spectral evidence alone. Increase Mather too made a point of mentioning Burroughs, the only witch he cited by name. The minister had deserved to hang. Burroughs had, Mather a.s.sured his readers, accomplished things that no one who "has not a devil to be his familiar could perform."

From a lofty alt.i.tude, Increase Mather indicated that he had heard that some believed the two books at odds. What strange things men imagined! He had vetted Wonders before its publication. He had not endorsed it only out of an aversion to nepotism. If he was containing his distaste for his son's runaway book, he did so convincingly. On one issue father and son were in perfect accord: whatever the fate of the witchcraft court, civil order must not suffer. The justices-and the government, which the trials jeopardized, inviting the new charter's critics to pounce-must not be compromised. Increase Mather offered not a word on court procedures. Only later, in his diary, would Cotton Mather a.s.sert that while he spoke honorably of the judges, he could not abide their methods. It was a difficult balancing act all around. At the head of the court sat after all the most trusted legal authority in Ma.s.sachusetts, a chief justice altogether intent on his mission, confident he was on the side of the angels, and delighted that young Mather was, with his forthcoming account, not only to allay doubts but, in his zeal and wisdom, "to lift up a standard against the infernal enemy, that hath been coming in like a flood upon us." Stoughton borrowed most of the line from the volume's author.

HOW RADICALLY THE wind had s.h.i.+fted was clear from Samuel Parris's October 23 sermon. That Sunday he delivered a sweet, sensual discourse on reconciliation. He worked hard on the address, pouring a good deal of himself into it. We know nothing of the circ.u.mstances under which he wrote, if in the parsonage Abigail continued to convulse, if Betty Parris had yet returned from the Sewalls, how the two healthy Parris children weathered a crisis in which they played an imperceptible part, how Ann Putnam Jr. fared. Changing his tune more nimbly than had Mather, Parris ventured beyond words, to embraces. He took the Song of Solomon as his text, offering a rapturous catalog of kisses: There were l.u.s.tful kisses, holy kisses, treacherous kisses, kisses of valediction, of subjection, of approbation, of reconciliation. A kiss betokened love and goodwill. Kisses were sweet among friends "after some jars and differences." The imagery was not uncommon; divine love translated naturally enough into a full-body immersion in grace.* But nothing could have const.i.tuted more of an about-face from Parris's divisive September 11 sermon than that singular, radiant discourse. It came as close to a tonic as one could expect from a man whose home and parish had been turned upside down, whose pews had been depleted, who contended still with a group of rogue paris.h.i.+oners and who had lost others permanently. Only in his conclusion did Parris revert to form. The Lord had sent Christ into the world to offer his love. Who would deny him? "His kisses are most sweet," lectured Parris. "If you will not be kissed by him, you shall, you must, be cursed by him." At those curses even devils roared.

Three days later, the legislative a.s.sembly considered a bill that contained a loaded disclaimer of its own. Satan roamed about Ma.s.sachusetts "with a great rage and serpentine subtlety." A sterling commission had done its best to contain him. "Notwithstanding the indefatigable endeavors of those worthy gentlemen," the plague continued unabated. The colony remained under "dismal clouds of darkness." Was a fast day not in order, to apply for divine direction? It seemed prudent for a group of ministers to meet with Phips's council to determine a course of action. They stood sorely in need of wisdom, the devil's rage threatening "the utter ruin and destruction of this poor country." A vote for the bill const.i.tuted a direct attack on the Court of Oyer and Terminer. The session proved highly contentious; the question neatly divided the a.s.sembly. After a bruising debate, the bill pa.s.sed, by a vote of thirty-three to twenty-nine. Some of those who had complimented Cotton Mather on his pages did so sincerely.

Sewall-who had voted against the bill-supposed that the court should immediately consider itself dismissed. Not everyone agreed. The a.s.sembly had addressed the matter only obliquely; the court was scheduled still to reconvene in six days. Stoughton pressed Phips for a decision. He found it elusive. Cotton Mather might well have been speaking for Stoughton when he discoursed that Thursday on perseverance. Both men agreed that the court's fall would be destabilizing, an admission of error and an invitation to further witchcraft. Both believed its work unfinished. Stoughton made regular trips to Boston in an attempt to pry an answer out of Phips; lieutenant governor and chief justice though he was, he could not extract one. The two men had not been close but on this issue the bluff governor seemed downright cowed by his deputy, a man of great political dexterity who could run intellectual circles around him. On one such effort amid storms on October 28, Stoughton wound up drenched after his ride from Dorchester over a flooded causeway. Not for the first time he sought refuge in the Sewall household. He sent home for a change of clothes. If he did not recognize the torrent as an omen he should have: in his absence the following day Phips officially disbanded the Court of Oyer and Terminer.

The pet.i.tions continued to pile up. Ten accused Ipswich witches pleaded for their release. They were unlikely to be tried that winter; already they were freezing. They would soon "perish with cold." Some were nearly eighty. One was pregnant, another nursing a nine-week-old. In the year that his daughter had languished in prison, a Chelmsford father had had sole charge of her two-and five-year-old children. He was without resources. A young Ipswich man suddenly recanted his May testimony against Elizabeth Procter. On January 27 she gave birth on the floor of the Salem prison. She named the infant John, after her dead husband. Sentenced in August to hang, she had been reprieved only on account of her pregnancy. She awaited an execution date. Also convicted, Reverend Dane's daughter applied directly to Phips for a pardon. She had spent four months in close confinement. Her accusers admitted they had lied; she was pregnant. (She believed she would already have been hanged were she not.) She was entirely innocent, with an incapacitated husband and six children. On December 14 Abigail Hobbs's father walked free when two Topsfield neighbors posted a two-hundred-pound bond for him.

Not everyone had yet finished with the visionary girls. Gloucester sent for them early in November. On November 7 three more witches were arrested, including a Higginson in-law. Fresh indictments turned up amid the old. On the last day of 1692 Elizabeth Colson-who had led the constables on the wild-goose chase through the fields, confounding even their dog-was finally imprisoned in Cambridge. Elizabeth Hubbard continued to convulse and accuse into November. Pinched, p.r.i.c.ked, and hauled under tables, Mary Warren was still testifying against suspects in January of 1693.

On a particularly dark and biting December day, the Ma.s.sachusetts councillors seated a new court to try the remaining witchcraft suspects. By unanimous vote, they named Stoughton its chief justice. Three of his former Oyer and Terminer colleagues joined him, as did Thomas Danforth, who in April had elicited the first mention of the witches' meeting. On December 22 Phips swore in the newly established superior court. Each man took the oath to, as Sewall summed it up, "impartially administer justice according to our best skill." In accordance with the new charter, the December jurymen consisted of men whose estates rather than church members.h.i.+p qualified them for service. As such they were less likely to bow to the whims of the justices. While not intimately acquainted with Salem village affairs, they had all the same been touched by the crisis; some had entered accusations, while others were related to witches. Once seated, they applied to the bench for guidance. What use should they make of spectral evidence? None, came the answer. The court tried fifty-two cases early in January and acquitted all but three of the accused. Reverend Dane's twenty-two-year-old granddaughter was convicted. His daughter was not. The jury found the widow of fortune-telling Samuel Wardwell guilty but his daughter innocent. (Both had accused the dead father and husband.) The court cleared Margaret Jacobs, whose plea survives. She alone refers to her accusers as "possessed persons."

Stoughton continued to hold tenaciously to the validity of spectral evidence. He considered himself on a crusade, one he fully intended to finish. Hurriedly he signed three execution warrants, adding five for those suspects convicted in 1692, Elizabeth Procter, Dorcas h.o.a.r, and Mary Lacey Jr. among them. He scheduled a hanging for February 1 and ordered graves to be dug. He seemed intent on proving that the laws of England indeed reached North America and indeed followed the guilty to the ends of the earth. Phips meanwhile conferred with attorney general Checkley, who feared he could no longer distinguish innocents from the guilty. Phips countermanded the execution, reprieving the eight convicted witches. It is unclear how Stoughton learned as much; he did not hear the news directly from Phips. Flying into a rage, he fumed: "We were in a way to have cleared the land of these!" He did not know who had obstructed justice but warned that the accused delivered the colony into diabolical hands. As he stormed off the bench, he spat, "The Lord have mercy on this country," his last recorded words on witchcraft. He did not appear on February 2, when Danforth took his place. Among the suspects who appeared over the next days was an eighty-year-old widow, the grandmother of the fleet-footed Reading girl. She uttered barely a word in her defense. Thirty witnesses testified against her. Paranormal things tended to happen to those who crossed her, exactly as she predicted they would. "If any in the world were a witch," noted Lawson, on hand for the trial, "she was one." She walked free.

By February 21, 1693, Phips was ready to declare the epidemic over. And he made plain to whom he had alluded in his earlier letter to London when he suggested that some public servants had overreached. It was on one man's account alone that the 1692 trials had been "too violent and not grounded upon a right foundation." That was the justice who had stomped off the court weeks earlier, "enraged and filled with pa.s.sionate anger." Stoughton had been reckless, overly precipitous, possibly even corrupt. He had authorized unlawful seizures of estates and disposed of them without Phips's knowledge or consent. Phips had questioned his methods; Stoughton proceeded despite multiple warnings and a vigorous outcry. Where earlier Phips had followed the sage counsel of his deputy governor, he now seemed as much beleaguered by Stoughton as by witchcraft. He sounds as if he is squealing to their parents about the misdeeds of a gifted, favored older sibling. Phips shut down the trials until someone better versed in law might weigh in, he reported, crediting Increase Mather and the New York ministers with his decision. (Over the intervening weeks Stoughton boycotted council meetings. He reported that he had taken a fall.) Phips had stepped in decisively, every bit the savior the Mathers would later advertise. "The black cloud that threatened the province with destruction" was, he a.s.sured Their Majesties' secretary of state, behind them. Given the danger to lives, estates, reputations, and official business, the matter, Phips huffed, "has been a great vexation to me!" All was now well. Their Majesties' business could continue unimpeded. "People's minds before divided, and distracted, by different opinions concerning this matter, are now well composed," he exulted.

Phips and the council had already designated Thursday, February 23, as a colony-wide day of thanksgiving, for, among other happy events, the "restraint of enemies with the check given to the formidable a.s.sault of witchcrafts." The administration returned to focusing on the original "source of all our mischiefs"-the French. They began to reimburse Ess.e.x County for the extraordinary costs of the trials; they would raise taxes to cover bills from innkeepers, constables, jail keeps, blacksmiths. A year of false witness, false confessions, false friends, false dichotomies, and false books published to prevent false reports had come to an end. The jails emptied. Accusations ceased. Most afflictions abated. As early as April 3, 1693, Phips referred to the events of 1692, to which he had put a stop, as "a supposed witchcraft." That month a letter applauding his leniency began winging its way from London to New England, that far-off terrarium. It arrived in July. Phips was by then more than ever convinced that a little backslapping seemed in order. He had, in halting the proceedings, single-handedly saved New England from ruin.

Still, the confessions tugged at some. There was a reason the October vote on the future of the court had been so close. Cotton Mather continued to fret that not enough had been done to exterminate witches. When he visited Salem in September 1693, he was unsurprised to hear a churchwoman predict a new storm of witchcraft, a punishment for the court having been dissolved before its work was complete. Well-informed, mild-mannered men subscribed to the same fear. Had the times proved more stable, a second inquest would, a.s.serted John Hale, have been in order. "Yet considering the combustion and confusion this matter had brought us into, it was thought safer to underdo rather than overdo," he concluded. They preferred to rest their case. They could correct any mistakes later. "Thus the matter ended somewhat abruptly," noted Hale, who knew that it had begun in the same fas.h.i.+on. Grappling alongside Parris for a diagnosis, he had observed Abigail and Betty in their initial fits. He had heard t.i.tuba's rock-solid prison confession. He had testified against Dorcas h.o.a.r and Bridget Bishop; he had coaxed the particulars of her flight and crash-landing from Ann Foster. "I inquired what she did for victuals," Hale would remember. Foster had then explained about the bread and cheese and described the refres.h.i.+ng stream.

It was to Hale as well that Foster confided her fears of George Burroughs and Martha Carrier, not yet established as the king and queen of h.e.l.l. She believed they would murder her, as their specters threatened. She outlived them both, barely. Among the last casualties, Foster died in prison on December 9, 1692. Her son paid six pounds and ten s.h.i.+llings-the price of a fine cow-to recover her body. The first to sign a diabolical pact, t.i.tuba was the last to be released. Having lent the previous year its shape, having introduced flights and familiars into the proceedings, having illuminated New England with her pyrotechnic confession but neither questioned nor so much as named since, she appeared before the grand jury for having covenanted with the devil on May 9, 1693. It declined to indict her.

XI.

THAT DARK AND MYSTERIOUS SEASON.

The truly terrible thing is that everyone has his reasons.

-JEAN RENOIR STOUGHTON'S WORK CAME to a sudden halt; the return to normality took a little longer. Economically and emotionally, disenchantment came at a price. Orchards and cellars, fences and woodpiles had been sacrificed to justice, which had consumed a prodigious number of hours. Twenty-five years earlier the Salem farmers had warned that households suffered when husbands rode off to battle invaders; they languished when wives rode off to probe for witch marks as well. The lucky families were those who, at crippling expense, welcomed home relatives, in some cases relatives who they themselves had denounced. Festering neighborhood grudges evaporated, supplanted by graver matters, the common cold wiped out by plague. Sorcery had engulfed them; at issue was the punishment rather than the crime. Spectral evidence was extinct. The belief in witchcraft was not.

There were some awkwardnesses. What of the woman whom you had accused from several feet away and who was back on her farm across the stream? Reprieved witches sat suddenly in the next pew. How to embrace the six-year-old who had sworn her now-dead mother had made her a witch? Mary Lacey Sr. went back to cooking and spinning alongside the eighteen-year-old who had publicly scolded, "Oh Mother, why did you give me to the devil?" At least some Ess.e.x County residents must have wrangled with the commandment against false witness. Any number of trusts had been betrayed, by parents, children, neighbors, spouses, in-laws, by the paragons of piety. Was it possible to listen to Reverend Noyes, who had interrupted defendants, or Reverend Barnard, who had organized the surprise Andover touch test, or Reverend Hale, who had testified against paris.h.i.+oners, in quite the same way again? How did Francis Dane minister to the congregation that had denounced nearly his entire family? Nearly 10 percent of Andover had been accused. The averted gaze must have been as well practiced as the strained neck. What kind of marriage prospects could a girl antic.i.p.ate when her mother had been hanged for witchcraft, implicating her in the process?

There were losses of faith as well as fortune. Newly returned to Boston, John Alden failed to turn up for communion on December 18. While his friends may have prayed for him in his absence, he had every reason to believe that they had sold him down the river. Reverend Willard's wife spoke sharply about the matter to Sewall, whom she held responsible. Months later he called on the Aldens. He regretted their troubles. He delighted in the captain's rehabilitation. His was a rare gesture; at least initially, recriminations preceded explanations and far outnumbered apologies. The Nurse and Tarbell families continued to boycott Salem village services; while the door-slamming, sermon-interrupting Sarah Cloyce had survived, her two elder sisters had hanged. She resettled in Boston with her husband. Philip English returned after nearly nine months of allegations against him to a ransacked house, looted down to the thimbles. He soon began rowing from Salem to Marblehead for Anglican services. Religious affiliations aside, it was difficult to believe he would ever again care to pray alongside Stephen Sewall. English began pet.i.tioning for rest.i.tution in April 1693. He was still doing so twenty-five years later.

The Sunday after Alden absented himself from the Third Church pews, Deodat Lawson preached in Charlestown. He spoke of family discipline, reminding the heads of households of their obligations to children, servants, slaves. Lawson warned against distraction and the rote discharge of duties. Parents should be neither overly formal nor overtedious. Ministers could be as remiss as anyone on those fronts; they too could prove "saints abroad and devils at home." For whatever reason, he aimed his lament specifically at children "twelve, fourteen, or sixteen years of age," a neglected and indulged cohort. Were those youngsters not the cause of New England's afflictions? No wonder Satan managed to frighten them "into subjection to him, and covenant with him." Their parents had forsaken them; confusion, rebellion, disobedience, and diabolical pacts followed. Lawson published the text-armored with an Increase Mather endors.e.m.e.nt and a Sewall dedication-in 1693. The pages could only have discomfited Samuel Parris. Lawson had strayed some distance from his earlier claim that the pious home was the vulnerable home.

There was as much cause for soul-searching at the Salem village parsonage as anywhere; five accusers and four of the afflicted lived at that address, more than at any other. Parris was not insensitive to the burdens his family had placed on the community. (One wonders what the villagers thought as they pa.s.sed his much-contested, much-discussed meadow.) Weeks after Lawson's sermon, Parris offered to forgo six pounds of his 1692 salary, "to gratify neighbors and to attempt the gain of amity." He would do the same again the coming year. (He could not resist adding that he made the sacrifice although events had cost him dearly, too.) He made no move to retrieve t.i.tuba, an embarra.s.sment and an expense. As the court was disbanded, as prisons emptied and families reunited, she remained behind bars. Someone paid her jail costs at the end of 1693, effectively buying her. She left Ma.s.sachusetts.

For some, the return to normality proved impossible. The taint of witchcraft endured; one forever carried about one an "indefinable peculiarity."* Before his death, John Procter had warned that suspects were condemned before their trials. They remained so after their acquittals. His widow's case was worse than most: he had made no provision for Elizabeth in his will, which left her contending in vain with her relatives, "for they say," she informed the court, "I am dead in the law." They had ample reason to want to wash their hands of a temperamental and tainted stepmother. (She moved to Lynn, where she remarried.) Reverend Dane's daughter-also reprieved on account of pregnancy-returned to her ailing husband and her six older children. She lived "only as a malefactor." Having been accused of "the most heinous crime that mankind can be supposed to be guilty of," her life was in tatters, her family, she feared, vulnerable to new charges. Nor was what she termed the "perpetual brand of infamy" the sole burden. Martha Carrier's strapping sons had survived torture. Having confessed to flying through the air to a witch meeting, they had helped convict their mother. Orphaned, they discovered themselves to be related to a woman immortalized as the queen of h.e.l.l.

While the hangings relieved afflictions, the trials crippled many more. Sarah Cloyce emerged from prison decrepit, having spent five months with irons on her hands and legs. Mary English returned from exile an invalid, to die in 1694, at forty-two. At least four witch suspects perished in prison. At the time of her release, little Dorothy Good had spent eight and a half months in miniature manacles. Her infant sister died before her eyes. She had watched her mother, against whom she had testified, head defiantly off to the gallows. Dorothy went insane; she would require care for the rest of her life. Mary Esty and Susannah Martin each left seven children. There were a great number of orphans.

Witchcraft demanded long memories and accountability; no one had a taste for either in 1693, when villagers who once forgot nothing suddenly found themselves amnesiac. Insofar as any of them searched for reasons, they asked what had brought down the "d.a.m.ned crew of devils or witches" in the first place. Their descent called for piety rather than apologies; Andover and Salem must not become as notorious as Sweden. New England did not care to be remembered as "New Witch-land!" It would be some time before anyone a.s.serted that you could not possibly fly through the air to a remote destination and return in an hour or so (for one thing, you would not be able to breathe, John Hale would point out in 1697), far longer before anyone suggested that twenty innocents had been put to death. (Hale went to his grave believing otherwise.) As for Brattle's a.s.sertion that when men err, we are duty-bound to point out as much, it too evaporated. Shame obliterated blame; few agreed that there is nothing so honorable as admitting a mistake. The pa.s.sive tense has rarely had such a workout; in the end the only one who dared point a finger was unruly Governor Phips. He reproached his crusading, calculating chief justice. Stoughton felt no need to defend his decisions, nor did anyone care for him to. Confessors disavowed their stories, some claiming that they had invented them in order to save their lives. Several accusers and witnesses were, it was revealed, "persons of profligate and vicious conversation." A few admitted they had lied; others insisted that they remembered nothing of what they had testified. It was as if all simply, suddenly awoke, shaking off their strange tales, from a collective preternatural dream.

The Mathers would go on prophesying the Second Coming and calculating its date, which in mid-1693 Cotton Mather promised was but a few years in the future. In the same sermon he railed against Salem's "matchless enchantments and possessions." The two words henceforth traveled in tandem. Witches reverted to "evil angels." Only occasionally did anyone allude to cheats or "distempered creatures," to "wicked and malicious people who feigned themselves bewitched, possessed or lunatic." Unneighborly behavior was again just unneighborly behavior; wives could again drag husbands from taverns without being accused of witchcraft. You could be lewd, just plain wicked, or raving mad. Women disturbed men in their sleep and transformed themselves into cats-as they had done for decades and would continue to well into the nineteenth century-but they no longer wound up in court for these offenses. It has been noted that in the years immediately following the trials women did not have an easy time getting convicted for anything. Villagers scratched their heads over enchanted fireplaces, ambulatory trees, and misplaced saucers but were more circ.u.mspect about those oddities, partic.i.p.ating in another New England specialty: that of leaving things unsaid. After the acoustical runaway of the witchcraft crisis-the voices rising to a fever pitch-1692 left in its wake a thundering reticence. Naturally most of what Ess.e.x County labored to forget is precisely what we want to know.

Some wrongs were immediately righted. In June 1693, John Ruck, the grand jury foreman, became the guardian of George Burroughs's orphaned, abandoned sons. He arranged for their baptisms. Also that month, the widow of George Jacobs, the salty, stooped wizard, married the widower of Sarah Wilds, the hay-enchanting Topsfield misfit. Their spouses had traveled together to prison in the same mid-May convoy. John Willard's widow, who had cowered under the stairs after his beatings, married a Towne in 1694.* Much remained the same. Released from prison, Mary Toothaker had no home to which to return, Indians having destroyed Billerica. Two years later they returned to slaughter her, carrying her twelve-year-old daughter into captivity. The fall of 1693 meant renewed carnage in Maine as well. Ma.s.sachusetts girls continued to disrupt sermons and convulse; by the fall of 1693 Cotton Mather was at work on a new case of possession, the first of two with which he conjured post-Salem.

The only brooms that played a role in the witch hunt were wielded afterward by men, to sweep the year under the carpet. The authorities who had fallen all over themselves to vindicate the ouster of a royal governor four years earlier felt no need to justify themselves in 1693. On May 31, every member of the witchcraft court was reelected to the Ma.s.sachusetts council-Stoughton by the widest margin, and Sewall with more votes than Saltonstall, who had stepped off the court. (Hathorne, Sewall, and Corwin still sat together on the bench twenty years later.) In his blundering fas.h.i.+on, Phips would continue to alienate every Ma.s.sachusetts const.i.tuency. By 1693 many had come to agree with the New York governor's description of him, as "a machine moved by every fanatical finger, the contempt of wise men and sport of the fools," a state of affairs that would soon land the lieutenant governor, his popularity undimmed, in Phips's office. Having prosecuted witches and then advised Phips against the proceedings, Checkley remained attorney general for at least a decade.

Maniacal record keepers, New Englanders did not like for things to fall "in the grave of oblivion." They made an exception for 1692, as they had for the Burroughs years, when Thomas Putnam retranscribed the village book of transactions, omitting those entries that "have been grievous to any of us in time past or that may be unprofitable to us for time to come." That account jumps from January 27, 1692, to December 7, leapfrogging over all arrests and trials.* The eagerness to forget was as great as, for nine months, had been the strong-arming to remember. Parris kept a scrupulous record of village deaths. They included two he attributed to witchcraft and one that others did, but no mention of Giles Corey or any villager who had hanged. One family lopped an accuser off the family tree. Others camouflaged themselves with alternate spellings of their names, not altogether difficult given the extant variations. No one noted precisely where the hangings took place. (It appears to have been the triangle of land bounded today by Proctor, Pope, and Boston Streets.) For a hundred and fifty years, Giles Corey's ghost would haunt the field in which he was thought to have been pressed to death. A monument to the events of 1692 would wait another hundred and fifty.

Sewall practically bypa.s.ses the events in his diary, an omission he would address five years later. The 1692 pages of the Milton minister-who recorded every thunderclap and haircut-are lost. Even critics of the trials, even men who in the clearest of hands preserved every detail of colonial life-Thomas Danforth was both-left no record. Willard's sermons for the summer disappeared from his published body of work and from an attentive churchgoer's notebook. Wait Still Winthrop's 1692 and 1693 letters are missing from his family correspondence. In what has been described as retrospective glosses, Mather collapsed his account of the trials into a few pages. His writing about 1692 is all rewriting. (He so much aimed his remarks at posterity that he referred to himself in the third person, a different brand of transparent, out-of-body experience.) Anyone looking for a true ghost story might ask what happened to the court's official record book, of which Stephen Sewall took special care and which he surely kept close at hand. That silence would be the real conspiracy of 1692.*

Even those who had reason to believe themselves unpardonably wronged remained tongue-tied. Pet.i.tioning for redress, the Corey children noted that their father had been pressed under stones. They could bring themselves to say about their mother only that she was "put to death also, though in another way." The word "witches" figures nowhere in the heaps of pasteurized reparations claims. Families referred instead to the "sufferers of the year 1692," to loved ones who had endured the "late troubles at Salem," to events precipitated by "the powers of darkness" in the course of "that dark and mysterious season."

LIKE THE MINISTER'S fence, pastoral relations in Salem village appeared beyond repair. Phips had not yet written London of his expert management of the witchcraft crisis when Parris invited five churchmen to meet with representatives from the disaffected Nurse clan at the parsonage on the afternoon of February 7. He needed to coax them back into the fold; their refusal to partic.i.p.ate in the sacrament spiritually compromised the entire congregation. After a prayer, he inquired into the men's grievances. They were unforthcoming. Parris suggested they return in two weeks' time. He knew their position perfectly well; the three had called unexpectedly earlier that morning, when he heard them out in his study. (On that occasion he took pains to separate the parties.) In appealing to the girls to name witches, Parris indulged in the same brand of shameless superst.i.tion practiced by witch-cake bakers. How could he have sworn in court that anyone had been raised by a touch or felled by a glance? Had it not been for him, raged a Nurse son and son-in-law, each for over an hour, Rebecca Nurse would still be alive. To their minds Parris was "the great prosecutor." The men refused to accept communion from their minister until he apologized.

The bulk of witchcraft literature on his side, Parris saw no cause to reconsider his views. And he remained a stickler. The "displeased brethren," as he dubbed them, returned the following day. Sarah Cloyce's husband climbed to the parsonage study first. A full church member accompanied him. Parris insisted on a second disinterested party. Both sides believed they were resolving their disputes according to the dictates of Matthew 18, a text that mandated two witnesses to a grievance procedure; the disagreement devolved into the proper interpretation of three verses of Scripture. Late in March 1693, the men produced an unsigned, undated pet.i.tion calling for a church council to determine "blameable cause," two words that most in Ess.e.x County kept painstakingly apart that year. Displeased to discover that the men had consulted with neighboring clergymen, Parris asked who, precisely, subscribed to their doc.u.ment. The Nurse contingent allowed only that they spoke for many in the province. Parris stuck the pet.i.tion in his pocket. "I told them I would consider of it," he noted. It was a year to the date since the incendiary, one-of-you-is-a-devil sermon that had sent Sarah Cloyce storming from the meetinghouse. The same day, in Boston, Cotton Mather and his wife lost a newborn son, a death Mather attributed to witchcraft.*

When an April delegation called-a group that included widowed Francis Nurse-Parris informed them that he could not talk. He was off to a private prayer meeting. Flanked by various Putnams and his deacons, he met the following week with his detractors. Plucking their paper from his pocket, Parris read it aloud. What did they call such a doc.u.ment? Because he termed it a libel. The Nurses produced a second copy, bearing forty-two signatures. Parris cried fraud. All the signatures appeared in the same hand! Had anyone even signed the doc.u.ment-the charge was staggering in light of events-of his own free will? And was he answering to disaffected villagers or to disaffected church members? Because this happened to be purely an ecclesiastical matter. The two sides went back and forth until nightfall. They were evenly matched. In cogent pet.i.tions and dramatic exits, no family had expressed themselves as energetically as the Nurses. And no one was so intent on justice or exact.i.tude as Samuel Parris, who-having devoted nine months of his life to meticulous testimony-now found himself accused of having produced garbled notes. (He was a far more conscientious reporter than many, including Thomas Putnam.) A large meeting took place at the parsonage a month later. If the Parris children still convulsed, they did so with cause: belligerent, grim-faced men tramped in and out of their home for a series of interminable, bruising debates. Already well familiar with a regime that rarely accepted apologies and issued none, that dealt in chapter-and-verse accusations and fussy, hoop-jumping technicalities, the children grew accustomed to the heavy footfalls in the entryway porch. After prayers that Thursday, Parris turned to the dissenters. What had they to say? They asked to air their grievances publicly. Parris managed to hold them off. Some fierce, un-Christian name-calling ensued, the kisses on which Parris had so tenderly expounded in October nowhere in evidence. The dissenters appealed to Phips and the provincial authorities. They got nowhere. In the fall of 1694 they turned to the Boston clergy. Willard directed Noyes, Hale, and Higginson to persuade Parris to settle the festering matter before a council of ministers. The word "witchcraft" figured nowhere in those communications.

Cotton Mather was in Salem town that fall and surely reiterated the message: Parris was causing a scandal. (It was on that visit that specters made off with Mather's papers. He returned home to find his young neighbor Margaret Rule tormented by eight demons-and asking, unprompted, about his missing notes. The seventeen-year-old had heard specters brag that they had stolen them.) Parris explained the village feud to his well-meaning colleagues. He had not been obstructionist. He did however insist on order. The dissenters subjected him to repeated abuse. He had tried to coax them back with his sermons; the church doors, insisted Parris, remained open. ("And as you are my sheep, I expect you hear my voice" did not strike the Nurses as an invitation, much less an olive branch.) He felt he had attempted any number of "kind and heart-affecting wooings." Still the defectors would not return for the Lord's Supper. His troubles, Parris insisted, were without parallel. The stalemate persisted. The Nurse men would not share the particulars of their grievances until Parris named a council. Parris would not name a council until he had reviewed the grievances.

On the afternoon of November 13, 1693, still unable to agree on how to proceed, Parris read his own complaints aloud to his critics. He had seventeen. The Nurse clan breached the covenant. They set an evil example. They were disorderly, accusatory, uncharitable. They reproached the community at home and defamed it abroad. They libeled their minister and hara.s.sed him in his own home, spreading word-to the governor, the court, and the Boston ministers-that Parris was "unpeacable." They claimed that he had made prayer impossible for over a year when they had been in their pews long after "the breaking forth of the late horrid witchcraft." The meeting consumed an afternoon. Two weeks later Parris informed the Nurses that the church had rejected their demand for a council. They might care to consider what Scripture had to say about making peace. He suggested a few texts. A full year went by.

Weeks after Phips had finally received a reply from the Crown to his February 1693 letter regarding the trials-Queen Mary signed off on a vague response, commending the care with which the governor had managed the crisis and advising him to proceed against any future witchcraft or possession with "the greatest moderation and all due circ.u.mspection"-seven ministers again exhorted Parris to resolve the dispute. He spent July 5, 1694, praying, fasting, and mulling over the issue with his stalwarts. He also rejected the ministers' advice. Weeks later they wondered if they had been unclear. They outlined a simple arbitration strategy. Parris was to resolve the matter before winter. Anglican and Baptist steeples had begun to rise in Boston. Mary Esty climbed to the gallows two years earlier.

In the record book over these months Parris's hand grows steadily more crabbed and cramped. The strain on him was great; the pressure to settle immense. On the afternoon of November 18, 1694, he returned to the meetinghouse to read aloud a statement several colleagues had vetted, the first public avowal that mistakes had been made in 1692, a paper he termed his "Meditations for Peace." (It included nine points, in contrast to his seventeen grievances.) Parris considered it a "very sore rebuke and humbling providence" that the witchcraft had broken out in his household. His family included both accusers and accused; he confessed that "G.o.d has been righteously spitting in my face." He denounced the superst.i.tious practices to which others had resorted in his absence. Acknowledging that he had erred in his "management of those mysteries," he conceded that he had been wrong about spectral evidence; the devil could well afflict "in the shape of not only innocent but pious persons." The girls who saw Rebecca Nurse torturing them spoke accurately. So did Rebecca Nurse when she disclaimed responsibility. Here a rustle must have gone through the room; Nurse was both dead and excommunicated. He should not have relied on the girls as diagnosticians. He regretted any inadvisable remarks he had made from the pulpit as well as any mistakes he had committed in recording testimony, a job for which he had not volunteered. He extended his sympathy to all who had suffered. Humbly he beseeched the Lord's pardon for "all of my mistakes and trespa.s.ses in so weighty a matter." He did the same of his congregants. Might they put "all bitterness and wrath and anger and clamor and evil-speaking" behind them, to move forward in love?

Parris expressed his desire that the congregation "heartily, sincerely, and thoroughly" forgive one another, which is different from extending an apology. He added too the deal-breaking disclaimer that undercuts all such demands: he begged forgiveness for offenses his paris.h.i.+oners believed he had committed rather than for those he believed he had. As a peace offering however the statement was substantial. Visibly moved, Nurse's son-in-law allowed that if their minister had acknowledged half as much earlier, a great deal of unpleasantness might have been averted. A public meeting was called for November 26. The dissenters took seats together, joined by a few outsiders. Pressed to share their reasons for withdrawing from the church, the men produced their paper, again refusing to allow it into the minister's hands. They had no intention of retailing the charges against him until they stood before the proper authorities. Parris prevailed.

On November 26, 1694, more than two years after the witchcraft court had fallen, Parris read a scathing condemnation of his ministry from the pulpit, Francis Nurse following along with the original on his lap to make sure that his reverend omitted nothing. Parris had fostered a climate of accusation. The girls made prayer impossible; the aggrieved families preferred to attend meeting where they might actually hear the sermon. Given the reckless allegations, they had feared for their lives. They refused to accept communion from the hand of a man so at odds with accepted doctrine, one who expressed no charity and who pursued unfounded methods with the "bewitched or possessed persons." (They made Parris seem like a bit of a madman, out of step with the rest of the clergy. They nowhere accused him of having manufactured a crisis, however.) He had testified against the accused. His court accounts were faulty, his doctrine unsound, his self-justifications offensive. When he had finished, Parris asked-needlessly-if the issues were solely with him. They were. Did the paris.h.i.+oners withdraw from communion on account of anyone else? inquired a deacon. They did not. Amid frantic whispering and scurrying, Parris launched for a second time into his "Meditations for Peace." Were they satisfied with his remarks? After an agitated conference, Tarbell replied that they would need to reflect a little. Four nights later they called at the parsonage, to insist on a church council. They found Parris's apology mincing.

Parris was not alone in being called upon to justify himself that fall. In November 1694 William Phips sailed for London to answer to charges of misconduct. They ranged from embezzlement to a.s.sault; in thirty months as governor, he had failed to satisfy a single Boston faction. Stoughton threw him a farewell dinner, one the guest of honor boycotted. Parris's travails continued well after. In April 1695 an arbitration council that included Willard, both Mathers, and the ministers from Parris's former Boston congregation a.s.sembled in the village. They found fault on all sides. Parris had taken any number of "unwarrantable and uncomfortable steps" in the "late and dark time of the confusions." He needed to extend some compa.s.sion to the Nurse families. Unless the congregation wished to continue to devour one another-it was the 1687 advice of the Salem elders turned witchcraft judges all over again-they needed to accept his apology. Should reconciliation prove impossible, Parris must go.

A month later a different group of ministers made themselves more explicit. It was time Parris move on. (He was at least making out better than Phips, who died shortly after arriving in London. Stoughton-who did a wizardly job compiling the charges against him-stepped in as acting governor, in which office he served almost without interruption until his death.) Having performed Mary Walcott's April wedding ceremony, Parris preached his last Salem sermon on June 28, 1696. Weeks later, forty-eight-year-old Elizabeth Parris died. The third minister to lose a wife in the parsonage, her husband buried her in the village, where her stone remains.* Most of the community remained behind Parris, who refused to leave Salem without his salary. They had lost three pastors already; losing a fourth would only exacerbate matters. They pet.i.tioned for him to remain. Suit and countersuit followed. In July 1697 the matter went to three arbitrators, including two former witchcraft judges. To them the Nurse family complained that Parris led his congregants into "dangerous errors, and preached such scandalous immoralities" that he ought be dismissed from his profession. He had stifled some accusations while encouraging others. He had sworn to falsehoods. Both sides reached to hyperbole; as his critics saw it, Parris had "been the beginner and procurer of the sorest afflictions, not to this village only, but to this whole country, that did ever befall them." The arbitrators ruled against him. Parris returned to Stow, the remote hamlet where he had preached earlier. Immediately embroiled in a salary dispute, he lasted a year.

ON AUGUST 12, 1696, Samuel Sewall, burly, flushed-faced, his gray hair thinning, was stung by a sharply worded comment. Out of the blue, an Amsterdam-born friend remarked that he would not think twice about it were a man to claim he had hoisted Boston's Beacon Hill on his back, carted it off, then returned it to its rightful place. The gullibility of witchcraft judges and the claims of "foolish people" who believed in diabolical pacts had long astonished him. He was a Boston constable; his implication was clear and pointed. The inexplicably athletic George Burroughs had hanged almost exactly four years earlier. The comment set in motion a process that Parris's slow fade may have delayed. However grudgingly it had been extracted and at whatever cost to his congregation, Parris's apology still qualified as the sole public admission of wrongdoing. A dark cloud of shame hung about.

Sewall was not alone in shuddering at the unfinished business. On Sunday, September 16, 1696, Stoughton, the council, and the Ma.s.sachusetts a.s.sembly met for a day of prayer in the Boston town house. Five ministers officiated. When his turn came, Reverend Willard castigated the authorities. Innocents had perished. Why had no official order been promulgated to entreat G.o.d's pardon? The c.u.mulative, collective sin weighed all the more heavily in a dispirited season, when G.o.d frowned on New England in crop failures, in swarms of flies, in epidemic illness, in Indian ambushes, in failed expeditions against the French. Mather's prediction that the millennium would begin in 1697 began to feel misplaced. That winter proved the most brutal in New England memory. Thick ice paralyzed Boston Harbor. With trade at a standstill, grain prices rose to unprecedented heights. Food was scarce. The momentum to address 1692 grew, urged along by the occasional scold.

In mid-November Samuel Sewall rode north for a disconcerting trial. Even before Thomas Maule had built Salem town's small Quaker meetinghouse, he had taken it upon himself to inform Reverend Higginson that he preached lies. The shrewd merchant seemed to have been sent to New England expressly to irritate its authorities; in a society that afforded little room to flex a nonconformist muscle, he exercised every one. It had been Maule who preferred to beat his servant rather than sell her, Maule who had chastised Hale when the minister prayed for Bridget Bishop at the gallows. She had killed one of Maule's children!* In 1695 Maule published a book, printed in New York, lambasting Ma.s.sachusetts for its Quaker persecutions. With delight, he noted that the volume created "a great hurly-burly of confusion." Stoughton ordered his home searched for the offending publication; Sheriff Corwin saw to the task, removing thirty copies and arresting its author, transported to the Salem jail, a less crowded address than it had been earlier. The books burned.

By the time the case came to trial in November, Maule was on the stand for both his blasphemous publication and his obstreperous, insulting behavior at his preliminary hearing. Sewall joined two other justices for a headache of an afternoon. It did not help that Maule-the kind of man who showed up for a hearing with a Bible under his arm and who breezily referred to the "High Court of Injustice"-hastened to equate Quaker persecutions with witch-hunting. The authorities were as odious as they had made Burroughs out to be. They had fought witchcraft with witchcraft. He mocked the village girls, with their absurd visionary powers. How could anyone imagine them to be "the true martyrs of Jesus Christ"? In November Maule went further, ridiculing the magistrates. Five times imprisoned and twice whipped, he was fearless. Did the court truly dare to sit in judgment of him, decrying his wickedness, when it had executed innocents? Those sanctimonious souls preferred their children to wind up "rogues and wh.o.r.es" rather than Quakers. And presto! Here was Reverend Higginson's daughter transformed into a witch.

The king's case presented, Maule addressed the jury. The court, he reminded them, had brought the wrath of G.o.d down upon the province. How could they prosecute him for his "notorious wicked lies" when they had murdered innocents and never repented? They had squandered all credibility; he did not need to point out that they had done so in that very room. It was no easier to speak or publish freely in 1696 than it had been earlier. But it was more difficult to be convicted. Maule had a rather novel defense as well, one that could work only that dismal winter. Indeed his name appeared on the offending volume. But the jurors would need to confer with the New York printer. How else to prove that the words "Thomas Maule" on the t.i.tle page corresponded to the man who stood before them any more than a man did to his specter?

Maule cautioned the jury: They should deliberate with care. They did not want to incur the same load of guilt under which other Ess.e.x County jurors now squirmed. Any ruling was theirs alone, the judges but their clerks, a biting allusion to the reversed Nurse verdict. To the shock of the bench, the twelve men found Maule not guilty. How was that possible, exploded a Sewall colleague; Maule's odious book sat before them! Patiently the jurors explained that they found the evidence insufficient. The printer had set Maule's name to the page. Mere mortals could not corroborate what those words represented. The justice sputtered that Maule might have escaped the judgment of man but would not escape that of G.o.d, to which the defendant, aglow with triumph, had a retort: the jury delivered him from unrighteous men who worked unrighteous deeds.

In December, momentum built-under conditions similar to those that had produced a witchcraft scare; New England appeared to be "upon the brink of ruin"-for a public acknowledgment. The task of drafting the bill fell to Cotton Mather. He continued to hold that while he could not support their principles, he could speak only honorably of the judges. (There was a "nevertheless" in that statement too.) They had been prudent, pious, patient. They had comported themselves far better than the common people, who had entirely succ.u.mbed to delirious brains and discontented hearts. He drew up a laundry list of impieties for the fast day, inserting "wicked sorceries" about midway through the thicket of drinking, cursing, and insubordinate children, the embarra.s.sing item you buried among sundries at the pharmacy counter. They had brought down storms from the invisible world that had led "unto those errors whereby great hards.h.i.+ps were brought upon innocent persons, and (we fear) guilt incurred, which we have all cause to bewail." To Mather's draft others appended language acknowledging "neglects in the administration of justice." The council-on which sat every Salem justice-erupted in fury; Sewall had never seen it so incensed. The "wicked sorceries" could remain. The miscarriage of justice must go. It fell to him to rewrite the bill. In the end the much abbreviated proclamation included neither references to injustice nor the word "witchcraft" or "sorcery." Ma.s.sachusetts would repent for whatever errors had been committed on all sides in "the late tragedy."

The wrangling, and Maule's imputations, weighed on Sewall. So did the chapter of Revelation he turned over in his mind those weeks, as heavy snow blanketed Boston. Through it he trudged two days after the debate, in distress, to fetch his minister. Both Sewall's wife and his two-year-old daughter, Sarah, were ill. The former witchcraft judge was that winter more susceptible to guilt, just as the Maule jury had been less susceptible to evidence; the same week a Boston woman upbraided him regarding another verdict, one into which he knew he had been "wheedled and hectored." The following morning at dawn little Sarah Sewall unexpectedly died in her nurse's arms. In the family's grief, the tiny corpse still in the house, Sewall's sixteen-year-old son read from Matthew 12, in Latin. His father shuddered at the seventh verse, with its reference to innocents condemned.* It "did awfully bring to mind the Salem tragedy," he brooded, his first private use of that word in connection with the witchcraft. After the funeral he spent a few melancholy minutes alone, underground, in the bitter cold, communing with the dead in the family crypt. Sarah was the second child he buried in 1696. In five years he had suffered repeated losses. He was miserable.

On January 14, 1697, the colony observed the province-wide fast of repentance. All work ceased as communities beseeched the Lord to "pardon all the errors of his servants and people," with special reference to Salem. As the minister pa.s.sed Sewall on his way to the pulpit that afternoon, the witchcraft judge handed him a note. It may have been extracted; Sewall had sensed Willard's disfavor through the gloomy season. He was stung by slights; he felt himself ostracized. Midway through the service, the open-faced minister signaled to Sewall, who stood in his pew, head bowed. Before the full congregation, in the presence of Sewall's grieving wife and children, his minister read his words aloud. Given the "reiterated strikes of G.o.d upon himself and his family," Sewall was acutely aware of the guilt he had contracted on the witchcraft court. He beseeched G.o.d to forgive his sin and punish neither anyone else nor New England for his misstep.* When Willard had finished reading what was in effect a single, jam-packed sentence-one that included "blame," "shame," "sin," and "guilt," four words Parris had studiously avoided-Sewall bowed from the waist. He then took his seat.

It must have been an agonizing moment for a man who shrank from criticism and who preferred not to stand alone; his was an act of public penance of which he knew Stoughton, at the very least, disapproved. The chief justice snubbed him afterward. Evidently he felt an apology unnecessary; the bill ordering the fast sufficed. In condemning the Andros administration, Stoughton had pointed to unreasonable, ensnaring judicial procedures. Out of favor afterward, he had declared himself "willing to make any amendment for the miscarriages of the late government." He saw no need to address off-kilter contests or legal missteps in 1697. That evening Sewall transcribed the text of the note carefully in his diary. A few blocks away, Mather fretted at his desk over "divine displeasure." Might it "overtake my family, for my not appearing with vigor enough to stop the proceedings of the judges, when the inextricable storm from the invisible world a.s.saulted the country?" The guilt lifts from the page. He prayed to the same end the following morning, receiving heavenly a.s.surances that there would be no retribution.

Others also took advantage of the fast day to unburden themselves. Twelve Salem jurors-including at least some of the men who had found Rebecca Nurse not guilty before Stoughton suggested they reconsider-that afternoon begged pardon of G.o.d and of all those they had offended. They would never do "such things again on such grounds for the whole world." Inching toward a justification, they acknowledged that they had been "under the power of a strong and general delusion." They had made poor decisions. Their statement carries light notes of reproach. No one had managed to enlighten them on the woolly matter; others had joined in shedding innocent blood. Cotton Mather preached that afternoon on the subject to the North Church congregation, including a salute to the magistrates and ministers who had suffered for their righteous service. Afterward Robert Calef, a Boston merchant and constable, accosted him. The two had already been in correspondence for some time. In his remarks Mather defined witchcraft as a pact with the devil. What, demanded Calef, was his source? Mather doubtless knew that Calef had posted Thomas Maule's bail. He could not have imagined the troubles the exasperating forty-eight-year-old Boston wool dealer was to cause him.

In 1693 Calef had begun work on More Wonders of the Invisible World, its very t.i.tle a provocation. Completed in 1697, the book was later printed in London. Already Calef had circulated a salacious paper accusing Mather of attempting to ignite another Salem with his treatment of seventeen-year-old Margaret Rule, who had delivered the news of Mather's missing notes. Calef suggested that both Mathers had handled the teenager indecently. They had done no such thing, Mather a.s.sured him. He had not asked how many witches sat on Margaret; he had expressly asked she not reveal names. His father had by no means touched her belly. Why would he, when the imp that afflicted her was said to be on her pillow? (He worked over those lines with uncharacteristic care, crossing out more than was his habit.) A Mather friend supplied Calef with the minister's account of Margaret's bedroom ravings and levitations, which Calef shared, a wholesale embarra.s.sment five years after Salem. Mather denounced him from the pulpit and nearly had him arrested for libel. Calef agreed that witches existed but argued that Scripture provided no reliable means of identifying them. Hanging them in no way inconvenienced the devil. Men, Calef believed, should desist from dabbling in divine affairs. They tended to make a botch of them.

The immediate wrangling was with reputations rather than consciences; for the most part it was easier to settle than offer accounts. When George Corwin died on a snowy spring day in 1696, Philip English evidently threatened to seize the body. He would return it, he bellowed, only in exchange for some portion of the fifteen-hundred-pound estate the late sheriff had confiscated.* The sight of his bobtailed cow in Corwin's yard infuriated him. English turned up repeatedly in court thereafter for withholding his church taxes (an offense that landed him in jail) and for undermining the authority of the Salem selectmen (an office to which he had been elected weeks before his accusation). He called ministers and justices robbers. He refused to wors.h.i.+p in a meetinghouse "infested" by Puritans. Salem's was "the devil's church." He was still blasting the clergy in 1722, when the court indicted him for calling Nicholas Noyes-dead for twenty-one years-a murderer. Family lore has him excoriating Hathorne on his deathbed.

Naturally no one took more shots at an a.n.a.lysis than Cotton Mather. Typically he inched closer and closer to the scene, placing himself more often at Salem than he had suggested in 1692; a reader of his later pages would a.s.sume he had attended the trials. Given how insistently he positioned himself at the center of events, it is understandable that he would come to be blamed for them, when he had urged every kind of moderation, denounced spectral evidence, attended no hearing, and played no prosecutorial role.* For once causality was not a burning issue; the origin of the plague of evil angels interested Mather less than its utility. So that proper use might be made of those "stupendous and prodigious things," he had written Wonders of the Invisible World. He regretted no page of that volume, despite the abuse the "reviled book" had earned him. Nor did he for a moment question the judges' "unspotted fidelity." He put his finger on something that remained invisible to him: political considerations had grossly disfigured moral ones. Mather did have one theory, either late in 1692 or very soon thereafter. Was this infestation of evil angels, he mused in his diary, not "intended by h.e.l.l, as a particular defiance, unto my poor endeavors, to bring the souls of men into heaven?" He credited others with that idea.

Mather folded something more of an explanation into his 1697 life of William Phips, a fairy tale written to exonerate a disastrous ad