Chapter Nine
WEDNESDAY, MARCH 12, 1692
SALEM, THE PROVINCE OF MASSACHUSETTS BAY
MORNING
It has been a cold winter in Massachusetts.
John Proctor is in the central room of his Salem farm home. Morning light is shafting through the small windows. His twenty-year-old servant girl, Mary Warren, sits across the room at her spinning wheel. Last week, Mary had a visit from seventeen-year-old Elizabeth Hubbard, an afflicted young woman. With excitement, Elizabeth told Mary about the turmoil taking place in Salem village.
Days later, Mary feels the Devil.
She stops weaving, staring into the shadows. She sees an apparition, a neighbor. She reaches toward it, pulling it onto her lap.
John Proctor notices her behavior. He is aware of all the craziness in the village, and it isn’t welcome in his house. “It’s nobody,” he says firmly.
Mary tells him she sees his specter.
“It’s my shadow,” he says. He has warned her before, “You are all possessed with the Devil. It is nothing but my shape.” If this nonsense keeps up, he threatens, he will have to “thrash” the Devil out of her. That’s the best way to deal with all this, he has boasted to others. One trip to the whipping post would end the spectacle.
Apparently, Proctor has hit Mary Warren before. In Salem, this is an acceptable way of dealing with miscreant servants and slaves.
Mary returns to her spinning wheel. In the past Proctor’s threats silenced her. Not this time.
Many in Salem are deeply disturbed by the witch hunt. But they are afraid, not wanting to attract attention. John Proctor is different—he loudly asserts the entire thing is a fraud.
Proctor is a large man, tall, broad-shouldered, and stout. He and his family live just outside the village and attend the town church. Like Francis Nurse, Proctor’s decision not to support the village parsonage infuriates the Putnam family and Reverend Parris.
John Proctor has been married three times, burying two wives, and has eighteen children. He settles near Salem in 1666, renting seven hundred acres of farmland and opening a tavern on Ipswich Road, the dirt path separating the town and the village. By Salem law, Proctor can serve only nonresidents, so his tavern becomes a popular stopping place for passersby, who often bring the latest news from Boston.
In 1678, Proctor was accused by neighbor Giles Corey and several other men of serving “cider and strong water to an Indian.” Corey testified the man got so drunk he passed out cold on the floor. Proctor is fined a small amount.
But it is actually Proctor’s third wife, Elizabeth, who runs the tavern. She is a robust woman with a tainted past. Her grandmother Ann is a Quaker and a midwife, two reasons Salemites distrust her. Ann’s ability to heal people and safely deliver babies is so unusual that the nearby town of Lynn tries her for practicing witchcraft. She is acquitted but remains suspect.
Elizabeth also has another curious connection to witchcraft: she is related by marriage to the executed witch Rebecca Nurse.
The servant Mary Warren has had a rough life. Both her parents are dead, and at an age when most young women are preparing for marriage, she is stuck working for low wages. She is looking for a way out. Against John Proctor’s wishes, Mary testifies against Rebecca Nurse. Proctor is furious. Once again, he threatens to beat her. But Mary Warren will not cease and desist.
People are beginning to believe that John Proctor is a danger to the community. He has influence. Many consider him the leader of the movement to get rid of Reverend Parris. He is a big target.
Several of the afflicted young girls claim his wife, Elizabeth, is tormenting them. The accusations are backed by Proctor’s enemies, including Reverend Parris. But John Proctor refuses to be silenced. Rather than hanging so-called witches, he tells anyone who will listen, it is the people behind this farce who should be hanged.
It is a fatal mistake.
On April 4, 1692, Proctor is arrested. The primary evidence is given by Abigail Williams, who says his specter attacked her. One week later, John and Elizabeth Proctor are questioned in court. They proclaim their innocence. Abigail Williams cries out that she sees his specter and says that he is “going to hurt” Sarah Bibber, one of the accusers. At that point, Bibber immediately drops to the floor and begins convulsing.
Although Elizabeth Proctor is pregnant, she and her husband are imprisoned. This is a big step. Until now, only females have been accused.
The Proctors’ property is seized by the sheriff, including all household goods and cattle.
Spectators pack the meetinghouse for every hearing. People squeeze together on the windowsills, blocking the light and making the courtroom even darker.
At Elizabeth Proctor’s hearing, the girls break into fits. Abigail Williams screams that John Proctor’s specter is in the courthouse. She can see him. He’s threatening to hurt her if she accuses his wife. The other girls join in. They claim to see him too. One of them even claims Proctor is sitting in the judge’s lap.
Mary Warren is not among the accusers—at least not yet. Instead, she cares for the five Proctor children, left alone when their parents are thrown in prison. Her silence infuriates the other girls—until they realize that she, too, is a witch.
Facing that lethal accusation, it takes Mary three weeks to admit that John Proctor’s specter forced her to sign the witches’ book. She is a witch, she confesses. Among the first people she names is Elizabeth Proctor, swearing that she “hath often tortured me most grievously by biting me and choking me and pinching me and pressing my stomach till the blood came out of my mouth.” *
The witch hunt expands. Whole families are ripped apart. In addition to John and Elizabeth Proctor, three of his children, two of Elizabeth’s relatives, and three more distant relations are arrested. The Devil must be stopped if Salem is to be saved. All opposition to Reverend Parris is now eliminated, and he attends most of the hearings, adding the authority of the Puritan Church to the proceedings.
Many people have known John Proctor for decades. They understand he can be difficult, but they also believe he is honest and fair. No one has ever seen him have anything to do with the occult. More than fifty people, including some of the wealthiest members of the community, file petitions, telling the court the Proctors are upstanding people and should be spared. The petitioners suggest that the Devil is behind the accusations, citing that Satan once used a specter to become the prophet Samuel.
John Proctor can’t believe this is happening to his family. He is a good Christian. He writes to Reverend Increase Mather, still presiding over Boston’s prestigious North Church, appealing for mercy. He asks the reverend to move the trials to Boston, where he might be fairly judged. He knows he has no chance if he is tried in Salem. “Our innocent blood will be shed” because “the People … being so much inraged and incensed against us by the Delusion of the Devil, which we can term no other, by reason we know in our own Consciences, we are all Innocent Persons.” *
“Help us,” Proctor begs Increase Mather. “They have already taken all our property, but they won’t be satisfied until they have [our] blood.”
The letter does no good. The powerful Mather will not intervene.
On August 2, the Proctors are tried. Among the evidence is Reverend Parris’s handwritten statement swearing he had been told that John Proctor threatened to whip the Devil out of Mary Warren. Also, when asked about the poor afflicted children, Parris accuses Proctor of saying, “Hang them, hang them.”
Instead, it is John and Elizabeth Proctor who are sentenced to hang.
Elizabeth’s execution is postponed because she is pregnant—although she must stay in prison.
On August 19, John Proctor and four others—including the former Salem minister George Burroughs, who had preceded Parris—are put on a horse-drawn cart and taken one mile to Proctor’s Ledge, near Gallows Hill, to be hung. The night before, in his dark prison cell, John Proctor writes a new will. He leaves his condemned wife out of it, believing she will also be executed. He wants to make sure his children get as much of his property as possible.
John Proctor and Reverend Burroughs are the first men sentenced to death. It is the biggest turnout for an execution thus far. People fall in behind the cart and walk solemnly up the hill to the hanging tree.
They get what they came to see.
The execution of Reverend Burroughs, forty-two, is a sensation. He lived a strict Puritan life in Salem for years before moving north to Maine. In fact, after being accused by twelve-year-old Ann Putnam, authorities had to travel sixty-six miles to arrest him.
While he is being transported to the gallows, a huge thunderstorm erupts. Many people believe it is the Devil’s attempt to free him.
Increase and Cotton Mather take special interest in his case. Increase actually rides from Boston to attend Reverend Burroughs’s trial. Cotton Mather warns everyone that Burroughs had betrayed the Lord in exchange “for the promise of being a King in Satan’s kingdom.”
Convicting a minister requires substantial evidence, so thirty people testify against Burroughs. One of them is Mercy Lewis, who had escaped an Indian raid in Maine with Burroughs years earlier and then became a servant in his home. “Mr. Burroughs carried me up to an exceeding high mountain,” she says, “and showed me all the kingdoms of the earth and told me that he would give them all to me if I would write in his book and if I would not—he would throw me down and break my neck: but I told him they were none of his to give and I would not write if he threw me down on 100 pitchforks.”
After hearing the evidence against Burroughs, Increase Mather writes, “Had I been one of his judges, I could not have acquitted him.”
Cotton Mather is front and center at the execution of the five “convicted” witches.
While all proclaim their innocence, they ask Reverend Mather to pray with them. He does. As George Burroughs stands on the ladder, the rope around his neck, he prays so diligently many people start crying. It is his final sermon and perhaps his greatest. “He gained the admiration of all present,” a spectator wrote; his words struck “like that would be produced by thunderbolts.” They knew him when he served the community. Many of them like him and wonder how they could have been fooled so completely. But they cannot forgive him.
Then Burroughs does something unexpected. In clear tones, he recites the Lord’s Prayer. The spectators are stunned: witches cannot do that. The Devil doesn’t allow it. One of the witnesses, Samuel Sewell, writes that the reverend’s perfect recitation “did much move unthinking persons.” *
There is a murmur in the crowd—folks beginning to question if somehow a mistake has been made. People were so upset, said one spectator, “there was fear that it seemed to some that the spectators would hinder the execution.” The afflicted girls speak up: they see the Devil standing near Burroughs, dictating the correct words of the Lord’s Prayer.
On horseback, twenty-nine-year-old Cotton Mather has been watching closely as the executions unfold. He’s pleased death day has finally come. But the prayer causes everything to stop. The spectators turn to him. He understands their confusion but says, “The Devil has often been transformed into an angel of light. Satan is a cunning enemy.”
The crowd is appeased. The nooses tighten.
The bodies are taken down and buried in a single unmarked grave. It is done so quickly, rumors circulate, that parts of Burroughs’s body poke up out of the shallow ditch.
Elizabeth Proctor is spared. She remains in prison until winter, awaiting the birth of her child. By the time John Proctor III is born in January 1693, the witch fervor has somewhat quieted. However, Judge William Stoughton will not relent. He makes a last-minute effort to have Elizabeth executed—but fails. She is eventually released.
Ironically, having been convicted, she is still considered a witch. All of her property is gone. It takes more than a decade before a portion of it is restored.
There have now been eleven accused of being witches executed in Salem. All citizens live in fear they could be next. Well, almost all.
For Increase and Cotton Mather, the witch executions are bringing fame and prosperity. They are absolutely happy to be doing the Lord’s work.