Escaping Salem: The Other Witch Hunt of 1692 by Richard Godbeer

means disappeared, but these were increasingly overshadowed by the accumulation of evidence against the accused. For years people had shared their suspicions only with trusted friends and relatives. After all, courts were often fickle in dealing with witchcraft cases: they would ask for information against an accused person and then, like as not, judge it inadequate, so that the witches went free. Goodwife Seager, exposed through the burning of maggoty cheese, had been convicted in 1665 but released the following year when the governor’s council rejected the grounds on which the jury had found her guilty. Accusing someone of witchcraft was risky because witches were notoriously vengeful and if set free might well wreak havoc among those who had testified against them. But once Daniel Wescot stepped forward, others took heart and volunteered incriminating information against the accused.
    As officials gathered evidence throughout the summer, there emerged a long history of suspicion and resentment surrounding the two women. Katherine Branch’s allegations against Mercy Disborough and Elizabeth Clawson were clearly part of a larger story. But how would the special court react to such testimony?  Would these magistrates prove any more reliable than those who presided over witchcraft cases in the past? Surely the overwhelming volume of evidence against the two women would force the court to act decisively. Such was its duty as protector of the peace and of the King and Queen’s subjects. Such, at least, were the hopes of those who believed the accused to be guilty as charged.

FIVE: WEIGHING THE EVIDENCE
    William Jones, Connecticut’s deputy-governor and a member of the special court appointed to deal with the witch accusations in Stamford and Compo, did not take his responsibilities lightly. There survives in the archives a memorandum in William Jones’s handwriting that summarizes carefully the established procedures for prosecuting an accused witch. It includes two sets of requirements: one for arresting and examining someone suspected of witchcraft, the other for convicting and hanging an indicted witch. Mister Jones most likely compiled this guide in preparation for the trials that would take place at the end of the summer in Fairfield. Like most other New England magistrates, William Jones had no legal training; he sat on the bench as a part-time public service, not as a full-time professional career. But he had devoted considerable time and energy to reading legal manuals and theological works that discussed the issues involved in witchcraft cases. He would now presumably compare the requirements for examination and conviction outlined in these texts with the evidence against Elizabeth Clawson and Mercy Disborough.
    Presiding over any case that carried the death penalty was a daunting responsibility. New England courts insisted on judicial rigor in capital cases: they demanded clear proof of guilt and required two independent witnesses for each incriminating act. In many cases where the evidence was circumstantial or problematic in some other way, magistrates handed down a sentence short of death, even as they voiced their suspicion that the defendant was, in fact, guilty. Some of the crimes that carried the death penalty were extremely difficult to prove beyond reasonable doubt—and none more so than witchcraft, a supernatural and therefore invisible crime. If a defendant was willing to confess, the problem disappeared. In 1663 Rebecca Greensmith from Hartford, Connecticut, went to the gallows after admitting that she had signed a compact with the Devil and used witchcraft to harm her enemies. But confessions were rare and without them magistrates were left with evidence that was mostly either circumstantial or spectral. Most magistrates considered the former a dubious basis on which to justify a death sentence and, as for the latter, could one trust information given by specters, which were, after all, the