The witches of Salem are an almost mythological element of American culture – yet few people realize that a quarter of those witches were male. The following Introduction to Clinton Elliott’s book provides an overview of who, exactly, those male witches were and the context for their court trials in 1692.
When I first became interested in the witches of Salem, I assumed, along with nearly everyone else, that all the witches were women. But when I looked into the subject more closely, I was surprised to discover that there were many male witches. In fact, it turns out that a quarter of all accused witches in the records were male.
The Salem Witch Hunt must be one of the shortest episodes in American history: it was over almost as soon as it started. The first warrant brought against a witch was issued at the end of February 1692. The last executions took place seven months later in September. How much history, how much anguish, occurred in those seven months!
It goes without saying that Salem in 1692 was a man’s world. Society was controlled by the clergy – all men, by the wealthy merchants – all men, and by the land-owning farmers, again all men. There was also an underside to this elite world: a dissident minister, a few meager merchants, many hardscrabble farmers and day workers, again all men. The male witches of Salem were drawn from both groups.
The first man in court, on April 1, 1692, was the wealthy innkeeper, John Procter, one of the two innkeepers in Salem Village, who was there supporting his wife. Elizabeth came from a family of witches. Not only were her sister, her sister-in-law, and her two children accused, but she was herself the granddaughter of the notorious witch Goody Burt, who had been accused back in 1669. John Procter rushed to his wife’s defense, but his vigorous attack on her accusers brought down on himself the full fury of the witch hunters, the magistrates, and the clergy. Revenge by the authorities followed, and Procter was hanged four months later. Elizabeth was spared when she was discovered to be pregnant.
The most notable of the accused men was George Burroughs, who was trained for the ministry at Harvard (Class of 1670). He drew upon himself the implacable wrath of his fellow Harvard man, Cotton Mather (Class of 1678), for his dissident beliefs, including opposition to infant baptism, and he was never ordained. Mather wrote the first account of Burroughs’s life, a brief and venomous production, and gloated at his execution.
Philip English was considered a foreigner. He was from the Isle of Jersey and was one of the richest merchants and fishing boat owners in Salem. He incurred the envy of his native-born rivals, and was charged with and convicted of the most convenient crime at hand, witchcraft. He and his wife escaped aboard one of their boats, while the sheriff, the nephew of one of the magistrates who convicted him, personally appropriated his extensive property.
Daniel Andrew was an important figure in Salem politics. He served as selectman in 1685, 1691, and 1692, and again in 1700 and 1702, before, during, and after the witch trials. His wife was Sarah Porter, and he took the Porter side in the struggle for power between the Putnam and Porter families that consumed Salem. It is no wonder then that a warrant was issued for his arrest on May 14, no doubt at the behest of Salem’s most assiduous witch hunter, Thomas Putnam. But Andrew and his wife got wind of their imminent arrest and fled.
John Alden was a military man and ship’s captain, serving Massachusetts in the French and Indian Wars. He was on duty in 1690 when the enemy came barreling down the coast of Maine destroying all the villages in their path. They reached York early in 1692 and torched it, killing over a hundred settlers. The destruction of York, only forty miles from Boston, sent the Bostonians into a paroxysm of terror. Alden was blamed for his part in the catastrophe, and accused, not unexpectedly, of witchcraft. But such a distinguished man was not so easily disposed of. An intercession with God on his behalf was ordered, a day of fasting. It paid off, and Alden was freed by proclamation.
Some of these convicted male witches escaped with their lives. John Willard was not so lucky. Willard was an obscure young man with a famous name. Major Simon Willard was the founder of several Massachusetts towns, including Concord and Groton. Rev. Samuel Willard was a noted Boston divine and sometime president of Harvard.
John moved to Salem Village when he married Margaret Wilkins, the first cousin of three of the dedicatees of this volume. He had been deputized to bring in some of those accused of witchcraft. But when he doubted their guilt and refused to round them up, he was himself accused. He went to his wife’s grandfather for help. But Bray Wilkins, who had been unable to piss for a week, turned the tables and accused Willard himself of bewitching him. Willard’s name could not save him, and he mounted the gallows with Burroughs. His relationship to the distinguished Willard family has not been established to everybody’s satisfaction. Had he got into the Willard family through the back door? Had he not got in at all? They certainly made no move to help him when he went on trial.
Lower down on the social scale among the accused males were two day laborers, John Jackson, father and son. The Jacksons were arrested for their connection to the convicted witch Elizabeth How. She was John the father’s sister, and had been hanged Hon July 19, two weeks before the Jacksons were arrested. John the father was an odd man who exhibited strange behavior, like licking other men’s crumbs off the table. John the son declared his aunt had not merely bewitched him, but had actually turned him into a witch. Father and son were sent packing off to jail, but survived.
Giles Cory and Samuel Wardwell, on the other hand, were sent to death on technicalities. Cory was an 80-year-old middling sort of farmer. He refused to enter any plea at all when he and his wife were accused of witchcraft in court. The English common law regarded this intransigence as tantamount to a plea of guilty, and the punishment was death by crushing under stones, peine forte et dure. Neither admitting nor denying his guilt, he finally died from this “punishment strong and hard’ when one stone and then another were heaped upon him for three days. His reported last words, “One more stone, please,” sound apocryphal.
Samuel Wardwell was a fifty-year-old farmer of Andover who enjoyed telling fortunes. It is unlikely he would ever have been accused of witchcraft if his wife Sarah, their daughter Mercy and his stepdaughter Sarah Hawkes had not been arrested first and confessed. Because confession was a necessary precondition of acquittal, Wardwell also confessed to save his own skin. The magistrates placed great weight on eliciting confessions: it saved them the burden of proving the guilt of persons pleading innocence. But when Wardwell opted to tell the truth and retracted his confession, the magistrates sent him to the gallows.
Among the accused men were several notable old-timers. Along with the eighty-year-old Giles Cory were Thomas Farrar and George Jacobs, Sr. Farrar was “an old grayhead man with a great nose,” known as Old Pharaoh. He entertained children by signing his name in hieroglyphics, though he could only sign his own name by mark.
George Jacobs looked like a wizard. He was an ancient who walked with two staves with which he was accused of beating his wife. He was a substantial landowner, and the patriarch of a large family of accused witches. One of these was his son George Jr., whose accused wife Rebecca was the sister of the Putnams’ arch-enemy Daniel andrew, also accused. A fourth person in his family to have been accused was his own granddaughter. Witchcraft could often be a family affair. These relationships were probably enough to hang him. But the old man was also feisty, something of a wit, and disrespectful of authority. Once when present in court, he impertinently told the magistrates, “You tax me for a Wizard, you may as well tax me for a Buzzard.” This was the last straw, and Jacobs was sent to the gallows.
Cory, Farrar, and Jacobs were the oldest among the accused male witches, but there were also boy-witches. None of the boys were from Salem, but Andover produced five. Three of them were the Carrier brothers: Richard, Andrew, and Thomas. They were all teenagers, sons of the scandalous Martha Carrier whom Cotton Mather crowned “Queen in Hell.” The whole family confessed, but only Martha was hanged. Another boy was Stephen Johnson, thirteen years old, and also a member of a large family of accused witches. He was the grandson of Francis Dane, Andover’s old revered minister, no less.
Stephen was arrested on September 1, 1692, in the last group of male witches to be accused. Five months had elapsed since April 1st, when the first male witch, John Procter, was arrested. During those five months the magistrates had been hard at work non-stop, gathering evidence against supposed witches, holding hearings, and dispatching the guilty to jail. But they had no legal authority to hold trials or issue death sentences.
All that changed in mid-May 1692.
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When the majestic frigate Nonesuch, 36 guns and a complement of 150, sailed into Boston Harbor on the evening of Saturday the 14th of May 1692, she was carrying the newly appointed royal governor, Sir William Phips, and a new charter for the province of Massachusetts Bay. Massachusetts had been without a governor since the ouster of Sir Edmund Andros in 1689, and without a charter since the old one was voided in 1684.
Arriving in convoy with Nonesuch was a merchantman with Increase Mather, Boston’s most important minister, aboard. A mighty frigate bearing a governor, and a mere freighter carrying a minister – never was there displayed a clearer demonstration of where power lay, and there it was for all Boston to see. Mather, the minister of Boston’s Second Church, had taken a leave of absence in 1686, and served as the agent for Massachusetts in London since then. He was tasked with reinstating the old charter and replacing the old governor with a new one.
He failed in the first instance over the question of gubernatorial appointment. The old charter provided for the election of the governor by vote of the freemen of Massachusetts. The Crown and the Lords of Trade in London, however, were determined to elect their own governor, and develop the province’s resources for the benefit of the colony’s backers in London, not its residents. Mather was disappointed in the extreme, but Phips was the silver lining. Uneducated, unpolished, and totally unsuited for the governorship, Phips had been hand-picked for the job by Mather, who hoped to roll a ball of wax in his warm hands. What Mather may not have fully grasped, however, was that this ball of wax was an ambitious, enterprising opportunist.
Phips was an early example of the American folk hero, the local boy who makes good. Born into an ordinary, hard-working family of farmers and Indian traders on the Maine frontier, he sought his fortune at sea and found it. He moved swiftly from ship’s carpenter in Boston to ship’s captain in the Caribbean, where, backed by wealthy London patrons, he led several expeditions hunting for sunken Spanish treasure ships. He hit pay dirt in the winter of 1686-7 with the discovery of the wreck of the Concepcion off the north coast of Hispaniola. He was soon back in England with thirty tons of silver worth £250,000 (£80,000 for the king with a knighthood in return) and the promise of the governorship of Massachusetts.
But most importantly for the matter at hand, Phips brought with him the authority to establish a court that could hold trials and impose the death penalty. This he did on May 27. Although the charter for the Court of Oyer and Terminer (Hear and Decide) did not mention witchcraft, witchcraft became the court’s chief business. Witchcraft cases had been accumulating in the absence of a local government to deal with them, and the jails of Boston, Salem, and Ipswich were packed with accused witches – more than 40 of them – awaiting trial.
One of the backlog cases was that of the innkeeper, John Procter, and his wife, Elizabeth. They were examined on April 11. At their trial, Elizabeth was discovered to be pregnant and let off, and John Procter became the first man to be convicted in the Salem witch trials. He was hanged on August 19, 1692.