CHAPTER XV

The Devil in Andover

It was in this season, that is some time between the June trials and the hanging of July 19, that the devil took over Andover.

He got in by the selfsame doors through which he had entered Salem Village, medicine and the ministry. But from the latter he did not get so warm a welcome as he had from the ministers of Salem, village and town. There were two ministers in Andover; it was apparently the younger, Thomas Bernard, who opened the door; the elder, Francis Dane, applied all his might to closing it, at least when he saw who was coming through. Dane was indeed to fight the plague with a heroism unequalled by any who had choice in the matter, risking not only his own life and reputation, but what must have come harder, the lives of nearly all the womenfolk in his family. And in this fight he was at first alone, deserted by his own deacons who regarded him at best as an old and failing man, too far behind the times to appreciate the methods of modern science.

It began with the illness of the wife of Joseph Ballard. It had been going on for a long time and there was little satisfaction to be got from the doctor who attended her. About the time that the Queen of Hell, Martha Carrier, was uncovered in Andover, Ballard was making up his mind where the real difficulty lay and looking about him for a more expert diagnostician to confirm his belief. Such a one could not be found in Andover; it was not that the town lacked for people who dreamed dreams and saw visions, but the local mediumistic talent had never impressed anyone very much. To be sure of the facts, to avoid any suspicion of unfairness, it was necessary to import one of the young seeresses of Salem.

Once Ballard made up his mind to undertake the experiment, he won the support of many of the leading citizens who regarded his plan as a civic project of great virtue. Goody Ballard was by no means the only invalid in town. Any number of people had sickness in the family, and even when the doctor found a plain physical cause, it was foolhardy to deny that witchcraft might not have originated and aggravated it. Ballard's neighbors stood ready to share the expense. Accordingly man and horse were sent to Salem to fetch back the likeliest accusers that could be spared.

That was how the younger Ann Putnam found herself one summer's day riding up to Andover for an outing. Puny though she was, the little girl sat well on a horse, for all the Putnams, male or female, were famous riders, and on the rare occasions when Ann was thrown, she had always been able to spot the witch responsible. She did not on this occasion ride alone. Mary Walcott had been persuaded to come with her.

It was a quite wonderful experience for the simple village maids who until now had hardly been farther from home than Salem Town. They were received with utmost respect, even something like reverence. It had not always been so in Salem Village. For all their fame they had always been plagued by the knowledge that there were skeptics about. Though magistrates and judges hung on Ann's every word, her Uncle Joseph Putnam did not; even that decent woman Sarah Ingersoll had never let her forget that for all her powers of divination she was only a little girl, as subject to discipline as any.

But here in Andover it was different. There were no skeptics -- at least they did not meet any -- and the deference accorded them could not have been greater had they been princesses.

What awaited them was touching. It was not only superstition but love and need that had summoned the girls.

In a score of homes, sickrooms had been readied with pious care and the visitation was being awaited in the same prayerful faith that the lame, the halt and the blind had once waited on Christ and his disciples. Such faith should have made them whole, and indeed in some instances it did, but there was tragedy for Andover in that the healers were not themselves whole, but full of corruption, and that it was the corruption they imparted.

The girls, led from house to house, focussed their tranced glare on the sickbed and almost always saw a variant of the same vision: one witch at the patient's head, the other at his feet. When they reported these things, very often young people in the house broke into howls, fell into convulsions, and had their own eyes opened to the horror. Ann and Mary could hardly enter a house without giving the gift of second sight to some of those within.

They had not gone far, however, before a serious difficulty arose. The girls were in a strange town where they were ill acquainted with names and knew almost nothing of the gossip which attaches itself to the witchlike, though in this they were probably receiving instruction. They could see a witch spectrally ply her trade but they could seldom positively identify her.

In justice to all it was necessary to conduct a scientific experiment. A conclave of public-spirited citizens, among them Bernard, most of the deacons of the church, and Justice of Peace Dudley Bradstreet, son of the venerable ex-governor, arranged the details and appointed the meetinghouse for the purpose. If the senior pastor, Francis Dane, disapproved at this stage, he did not succeed in making his disapproval effective against such impressive opposition. And anyway, the whole thing was an experiment which might come to nothing. At the meeting, however, he remained observantly in the background, leaving the public prayers to his eager colleague.

The experiment took the form of a kind of ghostly police line-up. The gifted girls were brought into the house in the throes of full possession, and one by one various men and women were led up blindfolded to touch them. Possibly not all of these so led had been originally suspected; in the interest of complete impartiality some people who should have been above suspicion were included with the others. But this impartiality produced unforeseen consequences. The test was that of touch. The hands of the suspects were guided to the hands of the girls, and if the latter then drew a sobbing breath and relaxed her struggles, the entire assembly was witness to the fact that yet another witch had been made to call off her devils.

What was unforeseen and horrible was that this phenomenon occurred nearly as often as the test was made. No one had supposed that more than half a dozen witches would be picked up in Andover. But before this business was done, Justice Bradstreet found he had made out forty warrants. Even that was not the end. Bradstreet quit at that figure not because Andover had run out of witches, but because he personally had declared himself done with signing any more warrants on such evidence.

On no one was the effect of the disaster more electric than on the men and women who so unexpectedly found themselves exposed as witches and wizards. "We were all exceedingly astonished and amazed and consternated and affrighted, even out of reason," testified six women in a joint deposition made much later. It was not uncommon for some of them to agree after so dramatic a demonstration that they must indeed have been practicing witchcraft; the difficulty was to remember how or when. Mary Osgood, whose husband was deacon, searching her conscience remembered a time twelve years back after the birth of her last child, a time when she had been ill and unhappy. Most like the devil had got at her then. On further thought she connected this period somehow with a cat, a cat that must have had diabolical powers though at the time she "no whit suspected the cat to be the devil."

Samuel Wardwell, diligently searching out his memories under the psychoanalytic probing of the magistrates, remembered that he had sometimes said "the devil take it" when a creature got into his field; perhaps that had given the devil his opening. Then he recalled that at the time of his unrequited love for the "maid Barker" he had seen an assemblage of cats. Cross-examination induced him to remember that the Prince of the Air had been with the cats and had made him promises, had sworn him to a covenant for sixty years and had baptized him in the Shaw Shin River.

The most remarkable confession either at this time or at any other came from William Barker, probable kin of "the maid Barker," vainly beloved by Wardwell. Subtracting from his account the compulsory fantasy without which no confession could pass as bona fide, one finds a significant element of sincerity. That he had wearied of the Puritan's endless preoccupation with damnation was indicated by the fact that the devil seduced him by promising an end to resurrection and judgment, to punishment and shame. That he chafed at class restrictions was suggested by the fact that he found appealing the devil's promise that all men under his rule should be equal and "live bravely." Barker was plainly a homespun philosopher with advanced ideas. In the cold eyes of the judges, however, his admissions were only proof of a damning heterodoxy and dissatisfaction with God's providence.

It was Barker who described the business-like, go-getting nature of the Witches' Sabbaths and explained why Salem Village had been chosen for attack; it was "by reason of the people being divided and their differing with ye minister." He also could and did give the exact number of witches now operating in Essex County, a dismaying figure far exceeding the present arrests -- 307, and this without counting some Connecticut witches who had ridden up during the spring to help start the campaign.

If one Andover witch faltered in his confession, a companion urged him on. The tormenters of Goody Ballard were early identified as Ann Foster, her daughter Mary Lacy, and her granddaughter, who bore her mother's name. The senior Mary Lacy sharply reproached her mother for pleading not guilty.

"Oh mother, how do you do? We have left Christ and the devil hath got hold of us. How shall I get rid of this evil one? I desire God to break my rocky heart that I may get the victory this time."

The younger Mary confessed glibly. "Where is my mother that made me a witch and I knew it not?" declaimed the girl, and went on with her disordered thoughts. She had not always obeyed her parents, had once run away for two days, a flight which in retrospect seemed virtuous. To her the devil had come in the shape of a horse. She had not been a witch long, not over a week, well -- hardly over a year.

Accused women who refused to confess were relentlessly pressed to do so by their next of kin. Sometimes this was because their husbands, to quote Thomas Brattle, "did break charity with their dear wives," aghast to find themselves mated with monsters. Other kinsmen insisted on confession true or false as the only hope of escaping the gallows.

Goodwife Mary Tyler had made the dismal journey to Salem with her brother and Schoolmaster John Emerson riding on either side, each demanding that she confess until she "wished herself in a dungeon than to be so treated."

Emerson, having made a shadow play of beating the devil away from her eyes, finally washed his hands of her. "Well, I see you will not confess. I will now leave you, and then you are undone, body and soul together."

Her brother persisted, saying that in confessing she "could not lye."

"Good brother, do not say so," wailed Mary Tyler. "For I shall lye if I confess and who shall answer to God for my lye?"

That she might be innocent was a preposterous notion to her brother. "God would not suffer so many good men to be in error about it." He talked of hanging and continued his demands so "long and violent. . . that she thought verily her life would have gone away from her and became so terrified in her mind that she answered at length almost anything they propounded her, but had wronged her conscience in so doing. She was guilty of a great sin in belying herself and desired to mourn for it as long as she lived."

Mary Tyler was not the only one who after confessing in the first panic, repented after sober reflection in prison. Samuel Wardwell, exposed there to the reasoning of the tougher-minded, including probably John Procter, renounced all his admissions of acquaintance with the Prince of Air, of baptism in the Shaw Shin River, and if he had seen an assemblage of cats, what of it? Who had not?

There were some stout enough to forbear any confession at all. Abigail Faulkner had a father who would not ask his kin to save their necks by inventing fantasies; he was Francis Dane, who was now trying to arouse the town against the insane course of action to which it had committed itself. The most that Francis Dane's daughter would admit to was to say that when the accusing girls irritated her she had struck her hands together, and for all she knew the devil might take advantage, but "it was the devil not I who afflicted them."

At its height the terror in Andover was worse than that in Salem Village. It came on so suddenly and on such a scale as to cause uncontrolled panic. No one was safe. When a dog was discovered to have been bewitched by John Bradstreet of Andover, another son of the ex-governor, Bradstreet did not stand on ceremony; he moved out to New Hampshire. When his brother, the Justice of Peace, refused to sign any more warrants, he too was cried out on. Afflicted girls produced spectral evidence that he and his wife had committed nine murders. They too went into hiding.

But the gale that blew so high the more quickly spent its course. An accusing circle which had formed in Andover, sometimes crying out on the dogs in the street, sometimes on their rulers and elders, finally met their match. They cried out on a gentleman in Boston, possibly though not probably the skeptical merchant, Robert Calef (see below), and the latter took novel action; he sent a "writ to arrest these accusers in one thousand pound action of defamation" and entrusted local friends to put the accusers under observation. So coldly legal an act, which no one in Massachusetts had thought to perform before, had a chastening effect. Adolescents tough enough to watch a hanging without a qualm blenched at the idea of someone's having to pay a thousand pounds. Their voices became discreet and then fell silent altogether.

And now that the clamor was subsiding people began to listen to the voice of reason and to the voice of Francis Dane. It was as if they had been in a dream; only under the spell of a dream could they have believed so much evil of wife or sister. But if they were awake now where formerly they slept, they were still faced with the results of their somnambulism. At least fifty of their own, fifty decent people, not tramps or scoundrels, now lay in prison awaiting trial before a court that had never acquitted a suspect. What was Andover going to do about it?

The Devil in Massachusetts: A Modern Inquiry into the Salem Witch Trials. Contributors: Marion L. Starkey - author. Publisher: Alfred A. Knopf. Place of Publication: New York. Publication Year: 1949. Page Number:178 - 190.

A note on Robert Calef: Calef, Robert (kā'luf) 1648–1719, known primarily as author of More Wonders of the Invisible World (1700). A Boston cloth merchant, probably born in England, he bitterly attacked Cotton Mather for his part in the Salem, Mass., witchcraft trials. The book, published in London because Boston printers would not accept it, generally condemned the view of witchcraft then prevailing and had a salutary effect throughout New England. It is reprinted in S. G. Drake, comp., The Witchcraft Delusion in New England (3 vol., 1866, repr. 1970). - http://www.infoplease.com

A note on Martha Carrier: At the opposite end of the social scale stood Martha Carrier, who came up for examination the same day as English. Martha was of Andover, but Andover did not claim her gladly. In fact when her family had first arrived in 1690 it had been "warned off"; Martha and her children had not only stayed but proceeded to have smallpox and to spread it "with wicked carelessness" and then to assume that "the care of them belongs to the Salactmen of Andover," an assumption with which the "Salactmen" by no means concurred. Now she had brought in a viler distemper, the witchcraft. She had been connected with a proved witch of Billerica, called "Aunt Toothaker" by her children, and any number of Martha's neighbors stood ready to testify that she was no less practiced in this art. The young seeresses of Salem Village had recently discovered that she was not only a witch but queen of all Massachusetts witches, Burroughs being the king. The Devil in Massachusetts page 143