Today in Salem: It’s dark, and the pious Mary Esty is crying and shrinking into a corner behind her husband, whose arms are stretched out to protect her as he commands the Marshall to leave. But the Marshall just leans in and reaches between the two of them.
“No! No! No!” she cries, but the Marshall is expressionless, pushing her husband aside with one hand and grabbing her by the arm with his other. It was near midnight when the Marshall had burst in, and they’d been sound asleep in their bed. Now he’s dragging her through the house and out the door, giving her no time to say goodbye or put a petticoat on over her shift.
Mary Esty had been in prison for just over three weeks when she was summoned by the magistrates for another hearing. The afflicted girls had said they weren’t sure any more that it was Mary’s specter who’d been tormenting them. One girl, the servant Mercy Lewis, disagreed, but the judges had released Mary anyway.
Mary has been home for only two days, but during that time Mercy Lewis has suffered even more severe fits, hovering near death, eating nothing, and begging Mary’s specter to spare her life. Now the other girls have changed their minds. Mary was behind their afflictions they say. She had just blinded them to the truth. The constable, magistrates, and Marshall agree, and now Mary has been arrested again.
Today in Salem: Thomas Putnam watches silently as his servant, the war refugee Mercy Lewis, is spitting, over and over, refusing to eat or drink anything from the Devil’s Supper, now in its second day. Thomas’s daughter Ann is quiet for once, and now they are both listening, waiting for Mercy to say the name of her spectral tormenter. Thomas has signed three of the six complaints against the accused witches, and he’s ready to do it again if need be.
Suddenly Mercy relaxes. Later she will tell her master that she’d seen Christ, surrounded by brilliant white light, with multitudes singing and praising his name. She is calmer than she’s been in a long time.
At the parsonage, Rev Parris is not calm, not at all. Once again his payday has come and gone, and once again nothing is offered. It’s now been nine months since he was paid. His supporters, led by Thomas Putnam, have provided food and firewood when they can. But the committee that oversees taxes has consistently refused to collect those taxes from the other people in the Village.
Most Puritans would ask God how they had sinned that God would allow them to be abused this way. Rev Parris is not most Puritans, though. He knows he’s right, and he will root out his enemies one at a time until they are vanquished.
Today in Salem: Three hard raps on the Putnam’s door announce a visitor: Rebecca Nurse’s son-in-law. When the door opens, he steps in without being asked and immediately confronts Ann Putnam’s mother.
“Who said it first?” he demands. “Who accused Rebecca first?” Yesterday’s slammed church door was a wake-up call to the beloved Rebecca Nurse’s family, and the men are taking action, starting with the Putnams.
Ann’s mother touches her pregnant belly and sits in her chair by the warm hearth. Her cheeks are flushed, but it’s hard to tell whether it’s from warmth of the fire. “If Ann says Rebecca’s specter is tormenting her, then she’s speaking the truth,” her mother says.
Ann Putnam is 12, but she’s never been questioned about her accusations. Now she’s shrinking as the man turns to her. ”Yes,” she admits in a small voice. She had seen the specter of a pale woman, sitting in her grandmother’s rocking chair. But she never said it was Rebecca. Her mother had encouraged her.
“You’re mistaken, child,” her mother says. “You were so upset. It was Mercy who said Rebecca’s name first.” Mercy Lewis is the family servant, but she’s not going to accept the blame, not this time. She, too, has never been questioned, and this angry man frightens her.
“How can you lie?” says Mercy, looking at Ann. And so it goes, from Mercy, to Ann, to her mother in a round robin of finger pointing that will not end.
Tonight the moon is new, and the dark tavern is lit by more candles than usual. In the flickering light, two men lean in to share a rumor they’ve heard: that the quarrelsome Elizabeth Proctor is the next to be arrested. But when a woman at the next table defends Elizabeth, one of the afflicted girls points into the empty air.
“She’s right there,” she says. “There!”
“Old witch,” another girl says. “I’ll have her hang.”
The men look at them coldly. You’re lying, one man says. He doesn’t see any specter, and he doesn’t believe they do either. Later he’ll testify that the girls treated it like a joke. The other man will say that the girls said they did it for fun. They needed to have some fun.
Today in Salem: Mercy Lewis, 18, is swinging a stick wherever 12-year-old Ann Putnam points. There! Ann screams. No, there! Mercy swings wildly, but the specter of Martha Corey just swings backs with a phantom red hot iron rod.
Ann’s father, the powerful Thomas Putnam, has invited the real gospel woman Martha Corey to visit, just to be sure that Ann’s visions are correct. It’s no small thing to accuse a church member of witchcraft. It’s a mistake, though. The minute Martha Corey entered the door Ann had contorted herself in torment.
Now Ann claims to see a man skewered on a spit, roasting right there in her parents’ hearth, with Martha Corey turning the spit. Suddenly Mercy loses control, swinging sticks and screaming at the specter, even though Ann is the only one who can see her.
Now it’s late at night. In a chair at the hearth, smoke is curling from her skirts as the refugee and servant Mercy Lewis inches closer and closer to the fire. She remembers her entire village burning, every structure blazing with heat and fire, even the cattle destroyed, and her parents dying brutally. How had she escaped? Why was she still alive? She can’t answer those questions. Now the fire pulls her toward it. It doesn’t matter that she’s sitting in a chair, that the hearth is laid with rough bricks, that two grown men are sweating and grunting as they try to pull her away. The chair just keeps moving forward, dragging all of them with it. Finally Ann Putnam’s uncle throws himself between Mercy and the fire then lifts, tilting her backward into the other men’s arms. They carry her to the corner of the room, where she’s safe, for now.
LEARN MORE: Why did Native Americans attack and destroy settlements in Maine?
22 years before the Salem witchcraft trials, English officials banned selling ammunition to Native Americans, hoping to quell rising tensions. Instead, they were inflamed. So when war broke out in southern Massachusetts, Commissioners were sent to northern Massachusetts – today’s Maine – to proactively enforce the ban on ammunition sales.
A letter dated Sept. 13, 1676 and sent to John Leverett, Governor of Massachusetts, about an Indian raid on Casco Bay, Maine.
The war spread to Maine, though, when the French (longtime foes of the English) gave ammunition to the Native Americans anyway, and British sailors killed a Native American baby. After five weeks of aggressive fighting on both sides, 60 miles of Maine coastland was wiped clean of English settlements. Native American villages were just as devastated. Families were forced to flee their homes and leave fields unharvested. With no access to fishing grounds or guns for hunting, many Native Americans starved.
A peace treaty was eventually negotiated, but the English settlers ignored it, flagrantly. Over the course of the next 20 years they intentionally blocked fishing streams, let their cattle destroy Native American crops, and inflicted other major abuses. (In one overture for “peace,” the English invited 400 Native Americans to attend a conference, and promptly captured and enslaved 200 of them.)
War broke out again, with the major event being the burning destruction of Falmouth (now Portland), Maine. Many of its traumatized residents – including at least one accuser and four who were in turn accused – fled to Salem, just two years before the witchcraft hysteria began.
WHO was Thomas Putnam?
A third-generation resident of Salem Village. Some of the most prolific accusers were his daughter Ann, his niece Mary Walcott, and his servant Mercy Lewis. He gave their accusations legal weight by seeking arrest warrants, transcribing depositions, swearing out complaints, and writing letters to the judges.
Thomas was aggressive in his support in part because he was a resentful and bitter man, for several reasons.
On a general level was an ongoing family feud between Thomas’s family, the Putnams, and the Porters. The Putnams lived in the rural Village, while the Porters lived in the Town. The Putnams were farmers, and the Porters were merchants. The Putnams were prosperous enough, but all of their worth and income were tied up in a farm. The Porters, with their ability to start and fund new businesses, eventually became one of the wealthiest families in the region. It was a classic conflict of rural vs. urban, farmer vs. merchant, and Thomas was squarely on the rural farmer side.
On a more personal level, Thomas’s father had recently died and left most of his estate to Thomas’s stepmother and half-brother, whom he disliked. Thomas felt cheated, even disinherited, and contested the will, but he failed. Adding insult to injury, his half-brother then married into the enemy side: Porter family. The feud just intensified.
Today in Salem: 12-year-old Ann Putnam is caught in the crosshairs. On one side is her mother, pregnant and fearful, demanding to know what specter Ann can see. On the other side is the family’s 18-year-old servant, Mercy Lewis, who’s spent the last two weeks witnessing Ann’s torments and accusations. Who? Who is tormenting you this time?
Her grandmother’s empty rocking chair is across the room, and now Ann says she can see a pale old woman sitting in it. But she doesn’t know who it is. Mercy and Ann’s mother lean into Ann’s face. ”Look again,” her mother says, barely breathing. “You must know,” Mercy says.
Maybe, Ann says, it’s hazy but she might remember where the old woman sits in the meeting house. Ann’s mother sits back and thinks. Maybe it’s one of the women who’ve already been accused. But Tituba is enslaved, and sits in the balcony where Ann wouldn’t see her. The beggar Sarah Good and the sickly Sarah Osborne don’t go to church, so they wouldn’t have been in the meeting house at all. That leaves the gospel woman Martha Corey, who attends church weekly without fail. It must be Martha.
“Martha Corey!” Ann’s mother says. “It must be her.” But no, Ann says. Between them, Mercy and Ann’s mother can see every person in the meeting house, with Mercy sitting in the balcony with the other servants and slaves, and the Putnam family sitting on the main floor. Now they tick off the name of each woman they’ve seen in meeting until Ann finally agrees wearily to one: the beloved Rebecca Nurse.
Ann’s mother sits back and thinks. Of course. Rebecca is beloved, even saintly. But her husband has been no end of trouble, arguing about land boundaries and recently even winning a well-known dispute in court against one of his neighbors. People say he’s been crowing about it, making sure his other neighbors know where his other boundaries lay, and daring them to push back. It’s easy to believe the Nurses have aligned themselves with the Devil.
WHO was Mercy Lewis?
A traumatized orphan and refugee of the Indian Wars in Maine. She was a servant in the powerful Putnam family. Mercy accused 9 people of witchcraft, testified in 16, and appeared with the other afflicted girls in several more.
Mercy was born and raised in Falmouth, Maine, where her village was decimated by Indian attacks that, early in her childhood, took her grandparents and cousins. Then, when she was 15 or 16, another brutal attack burned her village to the ground and killed most of its people, including Mercy’s parents.
Mercy and the few other survivors took refuge on an island, where the minister George Burroughs took her in as a servant. He was known to be verbally abusive to his wives, both of whom had died years earlier, and he may have been a harsh taskmaster. Perhaps that explains why Mercy would later accuse him of witchcraft.
Over the next few years Mercy served the Burroughs family, then an unknown home in Beverly, Massachusetts, and then finally the Putnam family in Salem Village. It was here that she befriended the 12-year-old Ann Putnam, and began suffering with fits and seizures. Today we might say Mercy had PTSD.
Once the trials were over, Mercy moved 50 miles north to Greenland, New Hampshire to live with her aunt. There she gave birth to an illegitimate child, married a man with the last name Allen, and moved away, probably to Boston. History loses track of her after that. Case files: Mercy Lewis
WHO was Rebecca Nurse?
A weak grandmother and much beloved member of the church. The accusations against her planted the first seeds of doubt in the trials.
Some historians speculate that a handful of women in the Village were suspicious of Rebecca because all eight of her children had survived to adulthood. This was unusual in a time of high infant mortality and diseases like smallpox.
It’s more likely that the animosity stemmed from years of land disputes between Rebecca’s father and then husband against other families, including the Putnams, who were the most powerful family in the Village. Most recently, the Nurse family had been part of a long and loud boundary dispute with a neighbor who claimed that some of the Nurses’ 300 acres were his. The dispute ended up in the General Court, where the neighbor lost, bitterly. The truth was more complicated, though. The Nurses didn’t own their farm; they mortgaged it. So it wasn’t the Nurses who’d won in court and insulted the neighbor: it was the farm’s owner. Still, many people believed it was the Nurse family who’d been so stubborn and argumentative. Case files: Rebecca Nurse
