The Witches: Salem, 1692 by Stacy Schiff Read Free Book Online

the innocuous ship had been sighted well before dark. They occupied the front lines. Would it not make more sense for the townspeople to come watch them rather than the other way around? The farmers prevailed, though not without Nathaniel Putnam, one of the wealthiest villagers, being fined for “bitterly affronting and abusing” the town officials.
    Tempers flared anew several years later when the town of Salem proposed to build a larger meetinghouse. We won’t pay for it, announced the defiant villagers, unless you help pay for one of our own. Repeatedly they lobbied for an independent parish, succeeding in the last days of 1672. Salem town supplied a hand-me-down pulpit along with a deacon’s seat, probably of riven oak, like the pews. The two Salems continued to annoy each other, the village because it was obliged to appeal to the town for legislation, extracted only with difficulty; the town because the villagers remained perpetually at odds, unable to resolve their disputes. Meanwhile the town could not seem to liberate itself from the farmers’ pesky questions about their church affairs. Could they not keep their antipathies to themselves? They seemed intent on devouring oneanother. Shortly after the Parris family settled into the parsonage, the town leaders essentially advised the villagers to leave them alone.
    The village officially hired its first minister in 1672. Sixteen years later, with Samuel Parris, it hired its fourth. Each would prove indelibly involved in the events of 1692, when their paths crossed with varying degrees of awkwardness. One man literally haunted those proceedings, while another recorded them. The third would return as a powerful wizard. A recent Harvard graduate, James Bayley preached his first Salem sermon in October 1671. He had turned twenty-two and married weeks earlier. The community did not unanimously take to him. Bayley was unqualified; he was offensive; he was negligent; he imagined his post to be more permanent than it was. A guest who spent three weeks at his home swore in court that she had never heard Bayley read or expound on any part of the Scripture with his family. His home life was doubtless tense. His congregants had agreed to build him a parsonage, an offer on which they failed to make good. The minister constructed a house himself; he and his new wife evidently lost two daughters in it before 1677. Meanwhile the community divided along party lines. Matters proved so incendiary that the parishioners could not agree on so much as who might arbitrate. Thirty-nine church members supported Bayley. Sixteen did not, including several of the most influential men in the community.
    Bayley’s tenure caught something of the flavor of Salem village. With him came his wife’s twelve-year-old sister, who at seventeen would marry into the redoubtable Putnam clan. Her husband was Thomas Putnam Jr., a son of the richest man in the village and a nephew of the elderly Nathaniel. Salem was composed in large part of Putnams, to whom both Mary Sibley, the impulsive baker, and William Griggs, the physician, were related by marriage. The two young couples—the Bayleys and the Thomas Putnams—grew close. That did not prevent other Putnams from attacking Bayley. It might even have encouraged them in their campaign. Samuel Parris knew of what he spoke when, on a Sunday afternoon in 1692, just before his home erupted in chaos, he observed from the pulpit that “not seldom great hatred ariseth even from nearest relations.”He took as his text Mark 13:12: “Brother will betray brother to death, as father his child. Children will rebel against their parents and have them put to death.”
    The Salem farmers carried their bitter allegations and implacable grudges to the mother church in Salem, ultimately to court. Bayley meanwhile filed a slander suit. The court ruled in his favor and ordered that he continue in his position. It could not enforce its decision; while the majority of his