arrest warrant
Today in Salem: 23 people are languishing in jail, some in Salem, and the rest – the overflow – in Boston. None has had a trial yet, but the judges aren’t thinking about that when they write arrest warrants for six more people.
The first is a woman in the nearby town of Amesbury; someone they haven’t even heard of. But the powerful Putnam family has filed a complaint against her, so they just write the name “Martin” and leave a space for her first name, which they fill in later: Susannah, and then cross out her station of “widdow,” even though she was one.
They know the second person well, though: the Reverend George Burroughs, the former minister of Salem who’d left two dead wives and a string of debts in his wake. They write his warrant in a decisive hand, but knowing that he can’t be fetched from Maine for an examination in two days, order the Marshall to “Convay him with all Speed to Salem before the Magestrates there, to be Examened, he being Suspected for a Confederacy with the devil.”
Others: the fortune teller and leader of a burglary ring Dorcas Hoar, one of her widowed neighbors, the rich merchant Philip English (whose wife is already in jail), and the widow Lydia Dustin, from the nearby town of Reading.
WHO was Dorcas Hoar?
Dorcas Hoar’s house. It was
torn down in the early 1900s.
Age 58. A widow who was also a fortune teller and leader of a burglary ring, which included six of her children and numerous servants in households around town. Among her victims was a local minister whose servant stole an abundance of money, jewelry, clothing, and food, funneling all of it to Dorcas Hoar. Once captured, the burglars’ only sentence was to pay the costs of what they stole, a light sentence indeed, but one that was still resented by the Hoar family, who beat two of the minister’s cows (one to death) in revenge.
Dorcas Hoar’s hair was four feet, seven inches long, a so-called “elf lock” where evil spirits could hide. During her trial, the suspicious court ordered that her hair be cut off, a devastating blow. Her execution was delayed when she confessed.
After the trials, she moved in with her son-in-law and died in poverty. Case files: Dorcas Hoar
WHO was Susannah Martin?
memorial bench in Salem
Age 71. Depending on you you asked, she was either “one of the most “impudent, Scurrilous, wicked creatures in the world” (Cotton Mather), or an “honest, hard-working Christian woman and a “Martyr of Superstition” (her historical house marker).
We do know that her past included six unsuccessful lawsuits to inherit her father’s estate. She had also appeared in court as a defendant numerous times when her neighbors accused her of a variety of offenses, including calling one of them a liar and a thief. She was accused twice of witchcraft the Salem hysteria, with the charges eventually dropped.
During Martin’s examination, she laughed at her accusers. When asked if she had compassion for the afflicted, the forthright and hardened Martin replied, “No. I have none.”
At her later trial, at least nine (perhaps as many as 24) traveled by horse for nearly three days to Boston just to testify against her. Among their grievances: she’d caused one man’s oxen to drown themselves, her specter had stalked a farm hand, she’d bitten another man’s hand, she’d driven a neighbor mad, and she’d been seen at witch meetings. Case files: Susannah Martin
Tomorrow in Salem: The beloved Rebecca Nurse’s friends rally