Today in Salem: The Boston jail keeper is wrestling with Sarah Osborne’s shackles and irons, trying to remove them from her motionless legs. She’s been chained for 9 weeks, and has spent most of that time lying in a pile of dirty straw, coughing day and night. This morning, though, they’d found her dead, probably of jail fever, and the only sound is the clanking of the chains as she’s finally released.
The beggar Sarah Good is also chained, and now she clutches her baby and turns away as much as she can. The baby is thin, and when she cries she sounds more like a little cat than an infant. Now she mewls when Sarah presses into her and hides her away. There are some things even a baby shouldn’t see.
“Length of Confinement: 9 weeks, 2 days,” the jail keeper later writes in his log. “Unpaid Fees: 1 pound, 3 shillings.” It’s unclear who will pay it.
Meanwhile, the extremely tall and abusive George Jacobs Sr. has stumped into the courtroom in Salem with his two walking sticks. He was arrested just this morning, and now he’s standing in front of a judge with hardly a chance to gather his wits.
The afflicted girls are there, of course, greeting him with their usual wails and torments. He’s seen through them since the start, even shouting in a crowd once that the afflicted girls were lying. And now here they are, with Sarah Churchill – his own servant – standing at the front.
Jacobs guffaws at the judges’ first words.
“Your worships, all of you, do you think this is true?” he asks. They bounce the question back to him. What does he think? “I am as innocent as the child born tonight,” he says, leaning on his sticks.
The magistrates bear down, quizzing the girls, batting away Jacobs’ protests, and asking him to answer to their accusations. Over and over Jacobs says it’s not him, that the Devil is using Jacobs’ specter as a disguise.
“The Devil can take any likeness!” he says. But the magistrates are firm in their response: While that may be true, Jacobs must give his permission for the Devil to impersonate him.
When Jacobs is unable to say the Lord’s Prayer without a mistake – and he makes plenty of them – the judges decide there’s much more to explore. They’ve run out of time, though, so they send him to jail to wait for more questioning tomorrow.
Outside the courtroom, two women find Jacobs’ servant Sarah Churchill sobbing.
“I’ve undone myself,” she cries, and looks at the floor. Just yesterday she’d confessed to witchcraft, but had found a delicate middle ground by blaming Jacobs for forcing her to. But it was a lie, she says now. She’s never signed the Devil’s book, and Jacobs has never asked her to.
The women are shocked. “Why did you confess then? Why would you condemn yourself?”
Sarah paces back and forth, crying and wringing her hands. She was afraid not to confess. And now she’ll never be able to take it back. If she told the authorities only once that she’d signed the Devil’s book, they would believe her. If she told the truth a hundred times now, they would not.
WHY is this important?
First, when most people hear about the Salem Witchcraft Trials, they think of hangings (and rightfully so). But several other people died as well, albeit less dramatically. Sarah Osborne’s death is the first one associated with the Trials, and kicks off the next tragic chapter.
Second, George Jacobs Sr.’s testimony planted a powerful question that shaped the Trials until the end. Can the Devil use someone’s specter to disguise himself? If so, then “spectral evidence,” which was used to execute 20 people, was useless. If it’s not your specter – it’s actually the Devil – you cannot be held accountable for it.
The judges’ response — The Devil needs permission to use a person’s specter — kept spectral evidence in play, and gave the judges more power. The only way to give the Devil that permission is if you are already partnering with him. Therefore you agree to the evil he’s going to inflict. You can be held accountable for that.
Finally, Sarah Churchill’s affliction, followed by her confession, shows a growing realization among the people who were accused:
- If they confessed, their lives would be saved (or at least prolonged). The judges were trying to identify witches. Who better to recognize them than other witches? So it was useful to the judges to keep the confessors alive.
- If they said they were innocent, they would probably be executed. The judges assumed from the start that anyone who was accused was guilty. Unless they could prove their innocence – which no one could, since it was their supposed specters committing evil – they would die.
Sarah lied because she wanted to live. To Puritans, though, dying (and therefore meeting God) with a lie in your heart was akin to eternal damnation. Sarah realized she’d condemned herself and George Jacobs Sr. at the same time, and there was no way out.