Part 16 (1/2)
Ipswich minister John Wise: R, 334. ”the clearest reputation”: R, 535. On Wise, see George Allan Cook, John Wise: Early American Democrat (New York: Columbia University Press, 1952), especially 5057. Also Hall, Ways of Writing, 182; Proceedings of the MHS, vol. 15 (1902): 281302; Wise in Miller and Johnson, The Puritans, 1: 25669. Evidently his works would inspire some eighteenth-century crusaders who thrilled to his rousing anthem: ”The end of all good government is to cultivate humanity, and promote the happiness of all, and the good of every man in all his rights, his life, liberty, estate, honor, etc. without injury or abuse done to any.”
”no more privileges”: Cited in Emory Washburn, Sketches of the Judicial History of Ma.s.sachusetts (Boston: Little, Brown, 1840), 106. The court fined and suspended Wise, although he was rehabilitated in time to serve as chaplain on Phips's 1690 expedition. See ”Revolution in New-England Justified,” 10, for Wise's heroism. The insults bore repeating; IM repeated them when pet.i.tioning the Crown; 1688, CO 1/65, no. 52, PRO; CM reproduced them in Magnalia, 1: 161.
”a vast concourse”: CM to John Cotton, August 5, 1692, in Silverman, Selected Letters, 40.
”solemn and savory”: B&N, 88.
his trial was the one: CM in Burr, 21522. Anne Powell, ”Salem Prosecuted,” for the relations.h.i.+p with the Checkleys and for Checkley distancing himself from the trial; see Lawson, appendix to Christ's Fidelity, 11415. Several members of the extended Nurse family had been in the Wells garrison during the 1691 siege; none appears to have stepped forward to defend Burroughs. We have the Burroughs account only from Lawson, who was present for it, and from CM, who accurately summarized those depositions to which his version can be compared. He also inserted flourishes, freely editorialized, and elided. For Burroughs's reply to the question about reading his wife's mind, Mather leaves us with ”The prisoner now at the bar had nothing to answer unto what was thus witnessed against him that was worth considering.” Lawson reported that nothing that Burroughs said sounded convincing; appendix to Christ's Fidelity, 99, 115. Testimony regarding GB's miraculous feats with the musket and the mola.s.ses barrel was enhanced by court reporters nearly a month after he hanged, R, 64647; evidently some uneasiness lingered. The Salem man who entered those charges had seen his mother hang for witchcraft.
”tergiversations, contradictions”: CM in Burr, 222. CM evidently had Gaul's 1646 Select Cases of Conscience at his elbow; he used pa.s.sages of it verbatim to malign Burroughs.
”there never was”: CM in Burr, 222. See Ady, A Candle in the Dark, 14264; I am grateful to Kent Bicknell for his notes on IM's edition of Ady. CM trips over Burroughs the plagiarist as he does over Burroughs the skeptic. He was himself a master compiler and copyist, never above retailing-and improving upon-the work of his closest friends.
”You are one” to ”he is alive”: Hale in Burr, 421.
Hale did but did not: CM makes clear JH's dissatisfaction in Magnalia, 2: 537.
character of one: As Langbein, Origins of Adversary Criminal Trial, 192, makes clear, that was perfectly acceptable. You might well enter court as ”a notorious cheat and shoplift,” to leave convicted of fraud.
”Had I been one”: IM, Cases of Conscience, in Proceedings of the AAS 10 (1896), postscript.
”The course of G.o.d's”: George Burroughs to the governor and council at Boston, January 27, 1692, vol. 37, 259, Ma.s.sachusetts State Archives.
IX. OUR CASE IS EXTRAORDINARY.
”WITCH, n.”: Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary (Cleveland, OH: World Publis.h.i.+ng, 1944), 367.
”the chief of all”: R, 244. Richard Latner is especially good on Andover and on the syncopated, geographic rhythm of the accusations, which spike suddenly and just as suddenly subside; Latner, ”The Long and Short of Salem Witchcraft: Chronology and Collective Violence in 1692,” Journal of Social History 42 (Fall 2008): 13756. Richard Gildrie, ”Visions of Evil: Popular Culture, Puritanism, and the Ma.s.sachusetts Witchcraft Crisis of 1692,” Journal of American Culture 8 (1985): 27, provides the one-in-fifteen-accused figure for Andover. By some calculations the figure is closer to one in ten.
”h.e.l.lish obligations”: IM, Cases of Conscience, postscript.
”being unadvisedly entered”: R, 540.
”And how old” to ”cat told me so”: R, 539.
”You are a witch”: R, 68687. Others glowered: R, 543.
a revised narrative: Rosenthal, Salem Story, 13236, tracks the change in narrative direction. Abigail Hobbs mentioned no meeting and no subversion. She did not fly; she had signed a covenant with the devil in now-forgotten Maine.
”Had you any hot”: R, 479. ”Did you used”: R, 473. ”But doth not the”: R, 548. No more than six or seven accused Andover witches denied the allegations.
”buzzings and chuckings”: Brattle in Burr, 189.
”mocking me”: R, 7056.
”hope he will”: R, 47475.
Confession came naturally: On the centrality of confession to NE life, see Hall, Worlds of Wonder, 17496, and Reis, d.a.m.ned Women, 131. Reis is especially good on sin and women and on how men and women confessed differently; 12164. ”she knew she was”: Mintz, Huck's Raft, 25. On confession generally, see Kathleen Doty and Risto Hiltunen, ”'I Will Tell, I Will Tell': Confessional Patterns in the Salem Witchcraft Trials, 1692,” Journal of Historical Pragmatics (2002): 299335. Margo Burns's superb ”'Other Ways of Undue Force and Fright': The Coercion of False Confessions by the Salem Magistrates,” Studia Neophilologica 84 (2012): 2439. In his Discourse on the d.a.m.ned Art of Witchcraft, Perkins suggested that a confession is all the more substantial when it contains an accusation. Rosenthal cannily observes that some of the remembered slights may have been invented ones; ”Witchcraft, Magic, and Religion in Seventeenth-Century Ma.s.sachusetts,” New England Quarterly 57 (December 1984): 601.
”in a cold dumpish”: R, 568. On the spiritual torpor and confessions, see Hall, Worlds of Wonder, 14447. Similarly, see R, 36768, 576, 6089, 630, 680.
”Methinks,” moaned Cotton: CM Diary, 1: 22.
”for the credit” to ”look with an evil”: R, 54243; a Reading woman confessed: R, 585.
no fewer than twenty witches: Again, the number is fluid. Depending on how one defines members of the Dane clan, it varies from nineteen to forty-five. Baker, in A Storm of Witchcraft, 10, notes that nearly a third of the accused belonged, directly or indirectly, to ministerial families.
simultaneously as village schoolmaster: RFQC, 7: 100. Barnard and the pigsty: Sibley, 175.
”The Lord would not”: R, 608.
”was his for ever”: R, 571.
”He is not an old”: R, 788.
”But afterwards”: R, 530.
”a pin run through”: R, 578.
a swarm of superst.i.tions: On the interpenetration of superst.i.tion and religion, all roads lead to Hall, Worlds of Wonder. It would have come as quite a shock to IM to learn that he was written off by his English political enemies in the 1680s as ”that star-gazer, that half distracted man” (Randolph to Bradstreet, September 4, 1684, Letters and Official Papers, 3: 322).
”much addicted”: R, 644. For Wardwell's background, Marjorie Wardwell Otten, Ess.e.x Genealogist 21 (May 2001): 8588.
careful with those imprecations: ”Discourse on Witchcraft,” MP, 28; R, 57677.
sieve and scissors: R, 573. The same week, Mary Warren swore that an Andover man had both practiced witchcraft and experimented with the sieve; R, 598.
”charm away witchcraft”: Lawson, Christ's Fidelity, 73.
”burnings, and bottles”: ”Discourse on Witchcraft,” MP, 29.
”charms and spells”: George Keith, A Refutation of Three Opposers of Truth (Philadelphia: William Bradford, 1690), 72.
Wait Still Winthrop's library: Winthrop, ”Scientific Notes”; three magical pills: ”Autobiography of the Rev. John Barnard,” 181.
”a wondrous thing”: CM Diary, 2: 349.
Robert Pike: Warren, Loyal Dissenter; Kences, ”Some Unexplored Relations.h.i.+ps”; ”Journal of Reverend John Pike,” Proceedings of the MHS, vol. 14 (1875), 12150. Pike took depositions when the Carr estate was contested from those who insisted that Ann Putnam Sr.'s father had been in perfect possession of his faculties on his deathbed and those who swore he had not; RFQC, 8: 353.
”temptations of horrid” to ”when once dead”: Pike, in Upham, Salem Witchcraft, 697705.
”strengthen other” to ”case is extraordinary”: CM to John Foster, August 17, 1692, in Silverman, Selected Letters, 4142.