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

the end paid him and advised him to forage for his own. If the decision rankled, Lawson left no record of ill will. He preferred to please. Twoyears into his tenure, his future divided the community. Were he ordained, Salem would constitute a covenanted church at last. It would also relinquish the land on which the parsonage sat, a New England sticking point. The Putnams supported the ordination, which several other families opposed on theological ground, because Lawson disappointed in some way, or simply because he was the Putnams’ man. Again the farmers submitted the matter to cooler minds in Salem town, where the authorities professed themselves heartsick to witness such a vast supply of “uncharitable expressions,” “settled prejudice and resolved animosity.” Why did they persist in making one another miserable? It was at this juncture that the town fathers asked again not to be disturbed by the villagers’ recriminations. “If you will unreasonably trouble yourselves, we pray you not any further to trouble us,” they scolded. Lawson opted to leave before relations deteriorated completely. The villagers were not unembarrassed by their behavior. They voted to purge the record book, which in 1687 Thomas Putnam rewrote, the squabbling of the Burroughs and Bayley decade omitted. It was thought those toxic entries might prove damaging in the future.
    Without an independent church and with no civic authorities of its own, the village was hamstrung when it came to settling communal differences. It was far from alone in its troubled church politics. The relationship between pastor and flock, it was said, should be like that between husband and wife. Indeed it proved as contentious as cordial. A Puritan devoted himself to examination and interrogation; he held his minister in a similar embrace. Plenty of clergymen inserted escape clauses into their contracts. Increase Mather, the most conspicuous cleric in New England and Cotton’s illustrious father, allowed that he was free to leave his Boston parish if the Lord called him elsewhere, if his pay proved insufficient, or if he suffered “persecution” by his congregation. Jobs were difficult to come by, as was job security; ministers were dismissed and ordinations delayed. One patient cleric waited twenty-seven years. At a 1720 ordination, malcontents launched water and missiles from the gallery. Arguments erupted even when a congregation liked itsminister. Two years before he kept vigil with the Parrises at a larger and more lavishly furnished home than his own, Beverly’s John Hale was ordered to serve as chaplain on a Quebec expedition against the French and Indians. His congregation objected. The case went to court. Hale sailed with the militia.
    Ministerial salaries ranged from sixty to a hundred pounds a year, more than sufficient—it put the minister among the topmost ranks of his parishioners—if collected. Voluntary contributions had given way to compulsory ones, resented by many in the community, a minority of them church members, all of them taxed. Regularly maligned and occasionally mauled, the fee-collecting constable fled from axes and vats of boiling water. The Salem constable suffered a painful run-in with a warming pan. * The people’s reluctance to support the clergy demoralized them; the ministers, Mather would thunder in 1693, felt cheated and starved. In the course of a protracted campaign to secure his salary, Topsfield’s minister announced to a town meeting that he hoped the parsonage would burn to the ground—with certain members of his congregation inside. Clergymen were keenly aware of what they earned, which they could not help but translate into self-worth. Cotton Mather at one point calculated his daily wage. Expectations were precariously high on both sides. In the mutual recriminations it was difficult to say which came first, the difficulties in collecting the ministerial salary or the griping about getting what one paid for from