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

congregants continued to support him, by late 1679 Bayley understood that he had no future in Salem. He moved across the village. Within a year the committee formed to name his successor settled on George Burroughs, a handsome, diminutive, dark-haired man who, though older, had been just behind Bayley at Harvard, where he had earned a master’s degree. The grandson of an eminent minister, Burroughs had since served at a number of frontier parishes, at the last of which he had heroically endured an Indian attack. He was twenty-eight.
    Again the Putnams played a crucial role. Burroughs and his family lived with a Putnam family for much of 1681, moving into the parsonage—the Parrises’ future address—only in the fall. Keenly aware of the collisions and disappointments that vexed New England ministries, Burroughs attached an arbitration clause to his contract. He would serve on the condition “that in case any difference should arise in time to come, that we engage on both sides to submit to council for a peaceable issue.” He landed in court all the same; it seemed an obligation of one church faction to make the life of the other faction’s choice miserable. From the start, Burroughs’s salary was not collected. When his young wife died shortly after the move to the newly built parsonage, he could not afford the funeral. On April 10, 1683, the villagers complained in county court that Burroughs had not preached for a month. He was hastily packing to leave—he expected to be gone that very week—but refused to explain himself. (His reluctance may have had something to do with the fact that John Putnam had loaned Burroughs funds, then threatened to have the minister arrested for debt when Burroughs could not reimburse him. The village was to blame on both counts, having neglected to pay itsminister in the first place.) Burroughs continued unresponsive, preferring to wash his hands of the fractious community. What I had wanted to ask when I called on you, explained one parishioner, an obsessive, outspoken potter, was how a village might prosper “when brother is against brother and neighbors against neighbors, all quarreling and smiting one another?” Their minister, the potter reminded Burroughs, was meant to be their spokesman and guardian, an intellectual light. Burroughs had been unwilling to organize private meetings or cool village tempers. He preached what he felt like. For his lucid if indelicate analysis, the potter was admonished by the court. Burroughs departed that spring.
    In February 1684 the Salem church committee brought Reverend Deodat Lawson to Salem. Unlike his predecessors, Lawson was British-born. He had arrived in the colony some five years earlier from Norfolk, where his father was a Cambridge-educated minister. Intended from birth for the clergy—Deodat, he explained, meant “given to God”—Lawson had somewhere acquired a formal education, although he took no degree. He wrote easily in Latin and Greek, in an exquisite hand. He benefited from some socially prestigious family connections in London, where he had worked briefly as an apprentice to a prosperous ironmonger and even more briefly as a royal physician before emigrating, early in the 1670s. Having served fewer than two of the expected seven years of a pastorate on Martha’s Vineyard, Lawson returned in 1682 to secular pursuits, in Boston. With his wife and two young children he settled in Salem. He was then in his early thirties. A third child, a daughter, was born and died in the village, where Lawson suddenly lost his wife as well. Given to drama and formal turns of phrase, he had a keen ear for nuance. He could be pragmatic; he praised family prayer so long as it was not overtedious. “God is not moved by a multitude of words,” he would note, though one wishes Lawson had felt differently. He supplied the only contemporaneous account of the events of 1692.
    The villagers voted to deliver firewood to their new minister but in