The Salem that wasn't: part two
Part Two.
Elizabeth makes the ultimate confession…
Knapp’s failed December 7 accusation of a neighbor was her last attempt to throw blame from herself onto others.
And, almost at once, her remaining self-justifications collapsed. The next day, December 8, she went into severe fits. After one bout lasting more than two hours, she admitted first to one, then to many, that she had given her blood to the devil and made covenant with him.
Groton had refused to accept Knapp’s repeated claims of witches in their midst. Now she had finally declared herself one. Willard, plainly, had suspected this for some time, seeing the devil’s hand in her fits, and in her accusations of others. He was now sent for, and told what had happened. There was surely “no room for privacy” on matters “already made by her so public,” so he examined her openly – and found her less ready to confess to him than she had been to others. But she said enough.
One day after she came to dwell with Willard, alone in a lower room, she saw the devil coming across a nearby meadow in the guise of an old man. Suspecting his purpose, she first thought to flee, but instead decided to stay and hear him out. When he came, he demanded her blood. She now claimed to have promptly agreed, and to have cut her finger with a knife. The devil caught the blood in his hand, and told her she must write her name in his book. She told him she could not write, but he said he would help her. He produced a little sharpened stick, which he put in her hand and guided so that she wrote her name “with his help.”(10)
Willard could not glean from her exactly what she had signed, but whatever the details it lasted for a term of seven years: for the first year, she would serve the devil, for the latter six, “he would serve her and make her a witch” – that is, he would grant her the use of demonic powers. (Such tropes were embedded in New England popular culture – informing Elizabeth’s imagination, and ringing true for her hearers.) Afterwards, he showed her hell and the damned, and told her she would go there and be tormented if she were not faithful to him. She asked him to show her heaven, but he told her it “was an ugly place, and that none went thither but a company of base rogues whom she hated; but if she would obey him, it should be well with her.”
… even if she denies being wholly lost.
Elizabeth claimed to have soon had second thoughts. Seven years, she realized, would soon be up, and then she would surely go to hell. And she feared that if she did become a witch, she would doubtless be discovered “and brought to a shameful end.”
Perceiving her distress, the devil urged her to give him more of her blood and sign again. She refused – though with threats and promises he made her promise that she would do it sometime. The devil began harassing her constantly, pressing her to follow through as she put him off. Everything climaxed on the night of her first fit. He came and demanded she sign again; she refused. He asked what harm it would do to sign, since she was his already. She answered that if she were his already, what need had he of another signature – whereupon he struck her violently. Even in this ultimate confession, Knapp tried to paint herself as not completely lost, and ready to answer the devil with a certain wit.
This was “the sum of the relation” Willard then had from her, “which at that time seemed to be methodical” – that is, plausibly self-consistent. She related it all with tears and bitterness. He asked the reason for this bitter weeping, and she lamented her sins – such as profaning the Sabbath. But to Willard’s surprise and discomfort, she did not list the greatest crime of all, “this sin of renouncing the government of God and giving herself up to the devil.” He pressed this point and urged prayer, to which she eagerly assented, now bewailing that worst of sins and declaring her desire to rely on God.
She also declared – notably – “that the devil had deceived her concerning those persons impeached by her, that he had in their likeness or resemblance tormented her, persuading her that it was they, that they bore her a spleen, but he loved her, and would free her from them, and pressed on her to endeavor to bring them forth to the censure of the law.” Willard had clearly been pressing this interpretation all along. Did Elizabeth notice his emphasis and echo it to win his favor? Or did Willard perhaps directly urge her to confirm his own view? Either way, this was a vital point for Willard, the key idea that so tragically failed to gain traction at Salem: that the devil, the prince of lies, could impersonate the innocent – that spectral evidence might show the devil’s deceptions rather than truth. (Her confession seems also to confirm that her accusations targeted people she disliked, and who she believed disliked her.)
Elizabeth desperately tries to reverse; Willard is skeptical.
Willard resolved to return the next day, “not being satisfied in some things.” He found Elizabeth remote and “stupefied,” staring – to the great grief of her parents – at a particular spot she had fixed on before when the devil presented himself. But at noon on the next day, Sunday December 10, she sent urgently for Willard – and suddenly recanted most of her confession.
Willard, at this point, was suspicious. He wondered if she had tried to backtrack upon some “hint given her” – he was probably thinking of her parents, trying to protect their only child – or even because Satan had moved her to a fresh deceit. But Knapp quickly and tearfully insisted “that she had belied the devil” in saying she had given him her blood. It seems the full implication of her own wild claims over the past weeks had suddenly hit her. Perhaps her parents had indeed tried to reason with her, warning her of the certain doom she faced if she persisted in these reckless stories. She tried, in evident panic, to take back much of what she had said, professing “that most of the apparitions she had spoken of were but fancies, as images represented in a dream, earnestly entreated me to believe her, called God to witness to her assertion.”
Willard was cautious – unwilling to believe, but also hesitant to condemn without certainty. He carefully told her he “would willingly hope for the best, and believe what I had any good grounds to apprehend.” But he insisted that she must provide “a more methodical relation than the former” – that her new story must explain the facts better than her first account; “otherwise, she must be content that everyone should censure according to their apprehension.”
Clearly now in the grip of fear as the reality of her situation pressed in on her, Elizabeth promised to satisfy him. She asked for as many to attend as possible, “that as they had heard so many lies and untruths, they might now hear the truth.” Willard and others assembled that evening. Striking closer to what – to modern ears – seems the likely truth, she declared that her actions sprang from “her discontent… that her condition displeased her; her labor was burdensome to her, she was neither content to be at home nor abroad; and had oftentimes strong persuasions to practice in witchcraft, had often wished the devil would come to her… and resolved that if he would, she would give herself up to him soul and body.” Despite this admission of sinful desires, she insisted the opportunity had never arisen. Rather confusingly, she now said that, though the devil did often appear to her, yet “at such times he had not discovered himself, and therefore she had been preserved from such a thing.”
Faced with this confused partial retraction – admitting sins of thought but not of deed – Willard was openly dubious: “I declared a suspicion of the truth of the relation, and gave her some reasons” (unfortunately not enumerated). But not wanting to commit himself before the assembled listeners, he “did not say much,” and nothing further could be gotten from her.
Willard took the chance to speak to Elizabeth alone the next day. By now he was thoroughly frustrated, warning “that she had used preposterous courses, and therefore it was no marvel that she had been led into such contradictions.” He offered “her all the help I could, if she would make use of me, and more privately relate any weighty and serious case of conscience to me.” She promised she would if she could, but said she knew nothing beyond what she had said the previous evening. Writing some weeks later, he still did not know not what to make of it all. He still hoped that God, if he saw fit, would “wind up the story, and make a more clear discovery.”
Elizabeth sinks deeper into despair.
Hopes of recovery were, in any case, soon dashed. Perhaps a sympathetic acceptance of her retraction would have brought an end to the matter; but that was simply not a realistic outcome, after so much drama, in a society that firmly believed demonic possessions to be real. Elizabeth was in too deep to extricate herself.
A few days after her private talk with the minister, she went into fresh fits. Different than before, they seem to betray the hopeless despair of her entrapment. Still speechless, she now became violent: she tried to kill herself, attacked others that held her back, spat in their faces, laughed if she caused them harm. At the rare times she spoke, she warned some to beware of sin, “for that had brought her to this”; she lamented that so many prayers had been wasted on her, and yet she remained so hard-hearted and unhelped. But when asked if she were willing to repent, she only shook her head and said nothing. Perhaps, having tried and failed to take it all back, she saw no hope in repentance.
On the morning of December 17, she was somewhat better, so few were with her in the afternoon. But then, the case finally reached its ultimate point. As Willard portentously described it, “the devil began to make more full discovery of himself.” For all his skepticism of her attempts at more innocent explanations, Willard had remained uncertain “whether she might properly be called a demoniac, or person possessed of the devil.” But now, it was finally “put out of all question.”
The devil speaks; Willard answers.
We can never know precisely what happened that day. Though we may safely assume that the extraordinary events her attendants described did not occur quite as they would have it, Willard was firmly convinced. He himself soon witnessed happenings he thought quite impossible in the normal course of nature.
Witnesses claimed that the devil first contorted the girl’s body and drew her tongue from her mouth “most frightfully to an extraordinary length and greatness” – and then, most horribly, he began to speak directly through her mouth. Her parents were summoned from the meeting house, where Willard was then preaching. As soon as they appeared, “he” – the devil himself – began to rail at them, “calling them rogues, charging them for folly in going to hear a black rogue” – Willard – “who told them nothing but a parcel of lies.”
Willard was called as soon as he was free. At first he did not understand the urgency – but then he heard the voice: “a grum, low, yet audible voice.” It greeted him as a “great rogue,” leaving him somewhat “daunted and amazed,” silenced and cowed, until God heard his groans and gave him “both refreshment in Christ and courage.” (Willard, surely, was also secretly flattered: his preaching must be something indeed if it goaded the devil into a personal attack.)
He called for a light to examine Elizabeth and see whether the voice might be “a counterfeit.” But the girl’s vocal organs did not move, and the voice seemed to issue hollowly from her throat. It again called him a black rogue, accusing him of telling the people a pack of lies. Willard answered boldly, calling Satan a liar and deceiver; he promised God would would vindicate his own truth “one day.” The devil evaded this threat: “I am not Satan,” he said with ominous mystery, “I am a pretty black boy, this is my pretty girl; I have been here a great while.”
Willard said nothing until the voice directly assailed him once more. He answered with his hatred for the devil. The devil retorted “but you had better love me.” Such expressions drove some present to “great consternation” – and “others put on boldness to speak to him.” Willard was “displeased,” fearing the devil might “insinuate himself” through strategy and “apish expressions,” and “raise in them a fearlessness of spirit of him.” (One suspects, also, that he did not care to have others intrude on his own great moment of personal confrontation with Satan.)
Willard, “seeing little good to be done by discourse, and questioning many things in my mind concerning it,” desired the company to join him in prayer. As they knelt down, the voice rose into a still louder torrent of abuse, trying to shout them down until, Willard noted, it was suppressed by God’s grace. The girl lay quiet as they prayed – but the abuse began afresh as soon as they had finished. Some again tried to challenge him. One, “I think imprudently,” told him that God had him in chains. The devil scoffed that for all his chains “I can knock thee on the head when I please,” and vowed he would carry Elizabeth away that night. Another rejoined that God was stronger, but Satan called that a lie and declared himself stronger. At this fresh blasphemy, Willard again warned the company to be wary of speaking, and to have “serious persons” watch over Knapp. And so he left her, commending her to God.
Tormented, or damned?
Two days later, the stricken Knapp confessed that the devil entered into her “on the second night after her first taking,” through her mouth, she thought, as she was going to bed (the sexual innuendo is obvious). He had been there ever since, though she did not know how he spoke in her. The next night she insisted on being carried down to “the Bay” (Boston) in haste, where an assembly of ministers could pray for her. But Willard, knowing the devil did not make good suggestions, was certain of a trick. It was winter, with deep snow, and she would surely die if carried off through the woods.
On the evening of Friday the 22nd, she was again seized violently. The voice again appeared, not speaking, but crowing like a cock as she made violent and sometimes “ridiculous” (lewd?) gestures. Willard went to her, and she signified “by signs” that the devil had threatened to carry her away that night. She was prayed for; God, Willard noted, had already proved Satan a liar by preserving her once when Satan had said he would carry her away, and they entreated him to do so again. The devil’s voice cried out against them several times, and the girl’s fits were so violent she later admitted she had not even heard the prayers. One wonders how closely she was listening.
Since then, Willard related, she had continued mostly speechless, the fits still coming erratically, with varying symptoms. By God’s goodness, they were so reduced in violence that any one person could manage her, rather than four or five. But she had fresh fits if strangers came to her, the more violent the larger the group.
She resisted good counsel even more than before, but sometimes desired the company of ministers. On Thursday January 11, he heard she had again denied a covenant with the devil and denied having cut herself or given him her blood. Again, revealingly, she declared her fits to be rooted in “discontent,” but she still admitted a temptation to murder. She conceded that the devil had power over her body, but hoped he did not have her soul. Thrashing about between self-justification and self-condemnation, she confessed a desire sometimes “to do mischief,” and a feeling of powerful compulsion, as if someone with twice her strength had laid hold of her – but she now said she did not know whether or not the devil was in her, and if he was, said she did not know when or how he entered. Knapp seems to have been collapsing in final confusion, unable to decide the truth of her own actions and feelings. The next evening, the distraught girl fell into weeping and sighing long into the night, and finally sent for Willard. He was unable to come on account of inclement weather and bodily infirmity (plus, presumably, growing fatigue and frustration with the whole affair). When he came the next morning, she struggled even to speak – and she remained speechless on January 15 as he drafted his account.
Willard’s cautious conclusions.
For his own part, Willard remained baffled. “I shall suspend my own judgment,” he concluded, “and willingly leave it to the censure of those that are more learned, aged, and judicious” – surely the reason he sent his manuscript to Cotton Mather. But he did summarize his own thoughts on several questions the case had raised.
“Whether her distemper be real or counterfeit”: he was satisfied that the great strength shown in her fits proved them real, for “such a strength is beyond the force of dissimulation.” “Whether her distemper be natural or diabolical”: he believed the latter. Natural convulsions, the nearest equivalent, were quite different; she had not wasted, but gained weight, and kept her natural strength for the most part when the fits were off.
A key point was “Whether the devil did really speak in her,” which, he conceded, “some have much doubted.” But he himself was firmly convinced, and he offered clinical observations in evidence. He watched her closely during these episodes, and saw no “instrument of speech (which the philosopher makes mention of) to have any motion at all.” Her mouth did not open and close as with normal speech, and he and others saw her tongue turned up against the roof of her mouth as the words were spoken. He noted with technical precision that the “labial letters,” such as b, m and p could not be expressed without moving the lips, yet were uttered with no such motion. “If she had used only linguals, gutturals, etc., the matter might have been more suspicious.” It had also been seen that when the voice spoke, her throat “swelled formidably, as big at least as one’s fist.” (It is worth noting that New England houses of this period were dark even in daylight, with low ceilings, dark wood, and small windows. Willard had called for a light to examine Elizabeth’s vocal organs, but all he would have had was the shifting and flickering light of a candle or lantern. Imagination can fly free in such conditions.)
On other points, Willard was less analytical, even credulous. The voice spoke to him in reviling terms, while Elizabeth had always spoken respectfully of him. These abusive terms were the same that she said the devil had used when tempting her, especially when he tried to turn her mind away from Willard’s preaching. (It would hardly be surprising that she would let loose normally buried hostilities in her outbursts, or that her ‘devil’s speech’ would echo her own accounts of demonic temptation.) But he left all these arguments “to the censure of the judicious.”
The most crucial question for Elizabeth herself was “Whether she have covenanted with the devil or no.” Willard’s reluctance to assume the worst, his underlying morality, may have saved her life. He judged the matter “unanswerable, her declarations have been so contradictory… and her condition is such as administers many doubts.” Some would doubtless have taken her worst-case confession as truth, and rejected her denials as trickery. But Willard simply was not sure – and he was not willing to condemn the girl on the basis of contradictory evidence; “charity would hope the best,” he conceded, “love would fear the worst.” What was clear, he concluded, was that “she is an object of pity.” He hoped that all who heard of her would show compassion for her forlorn state. He was certain she remained “a subject of hope,” and deserved all attempts to secure her recovery. “She is a monument of divine severity; and the Lord grant that all that see or hear, may fear and tremble.”
What happened?
We can never know what was truly happening in Knapp’s own mind. Historians examining the case have tended to mold it into their own analytical frameworks, be it psychohistory or feminism.(11) Yet we have only scattered clues about Knapp’s internal motivations and troubles. Her own reported words clearly suggest resentment towards her servant’s lot. She would have known that would not be permanent: given her father’s standing in the town, she had every reason to expect marriage and normal domestic life. But perhaps that prospect did not strike her as truly different from the work she already disliked – or perhaps, like many teenagers, she was unable to look beyond present despair. The temptations she described centered on money and ease, with added hints of travel and excitement. Her accusations of other women in the town focused, by her own roundabout admission, on those she disliked, and believed had treated her badly.
Given the reported behavior of Knapp’s mother, mental instability may have played a role, helping to turn inner turmoil into outward chaos. Clearly, the fits were genuinely violent. On the presumably safe assumption that Knapp was not actually inhabited by Satan, her histrionic abilities were clearly remarkable: Willard’s claims that her lips did not move or her larynx vibrate as the devil spoke in her suggest an extraordinary physical effort (in addition, doubtless, to poor lighting and an audience disposed to believe). Yet successful display and remarkable effort do not necessarily imply a conscious decision to deceive. Knapp may truly have believed herself, in her misery and confusion, to be under siege by the devil. The mind is capable of enormous power over the body – especially in a society that truly believes in external possession. Either Elizabeth was able to fool others who believed, or – more likely – she had come to believe herself, allowing her subconscious to lash out with otherwise unknown freedom at her esteemed master and minister.
Resolution.
We do not know how or when the case ended. But end it did. Willard would obliquely invoke the local trauma in his Groton sermons. In a collection published in 1673, he warned that “discontent layes us exceeding open to the assaults of Satan, and gives him more then ordinary advantage to make discoveries of himself to us.” Clearly he saw Elizabeth’s confessed dissatisfaction with her lot as the devil’s entry point: “by discontent we discover a weariness of Gods Government, and therefore Satan is emboldened by it to come, yea to make his Apparitions, and strike in to the drawing over of poor creatures to enter a Covenant of Rebellion with him, and a wonder it is if any at such a time escape.”(12)
That statement, however darkly, carries a note of celebration – for one indeed did escape. Satan had come to Elizabeth through her discontentment, made his apparitions, and tempted that poor creature to enter into his covenant. But, by the wonder of God, she had escaped. Elizabeth, and Groton, had survived the attack. In a sense, Groton was honored: the devil had surely chosen a godly target for his assault, and God had worked to save them.
However Knapp’s “possession” finally ended, the community – presumably at Willard’s urging – chose to reaccept her. Scattered appearances in public records give glimpses of her later life. In September 1674, then nineteen, she was married in Cambridge – however she came to be there – to the ironically named Samuel Scripture. Later records show them back in Groton. They were married at least twenty-five years, and she bore at least six children by 1700. By 1707, when she would have been fifty-two, she was evidently dead; Samuel had a second wife and a new child by that year. Scripture was not especially prosperous, and held a few minor town offices; he was notably less prominent than Elizabeth’s own father. On the whole, she led a normal if somewhat disappointing life. Things could certainly have been far worse, for her and for her neighbors.
1692: Willard’s warnings and their cost.
Willard, on the other hand, despite his own encounters with trauma and loss, rose rapidly to notice and prominence. He remained in Groton until 1676, when the town was struck by Indian attack during King Philip’s War. Others later returned, but he did not. He relocated to Charlestown, where he lost his wife, and then moved to a prominent Boston pulpit in 1678, where he soon remarried. His reputation, as an intellectual religious moderate, continued to grow.
And – while he never doubted the reality of witchcraft or demonic possession – Willard would not forget his suspicion of the devil’s lies. As the Salem case developed, he fully accepted that devils did assault and possess, that they did recruit witches and assail others in pursuit of fresh recruits. He clearly accepted that the devil was at work in Salem Village and beyond. But as the panic spread, he soon emerged as a voice of caution. The grounds were familiar, for he had already raised them in 1672 – indeed, had put them directly into Knapp’s own mouth (if she said such things at all, she had surely done so under his influence): the devil, the ultimate master of lies, could impersonate the form of an innocent person – indeed, the devil would likely choose to do exactly that, to further undermine the godly. Such an argument blew a vast hole in the spectral evidence relied upon so unquestioningly – and so disastrously – in the Salem trials.(13)
As Willard’s sermons grew more pointed in the summer of 1692, word of his skepticism got back to the Salem Village accusers. During one of the trials, one of the girls suddenly cried out that Willard was afflicting her. The judges – several of them members of Willard’s own church – curtly told her she was mistaken. But the accusation may yet have had effect: the minister’s sermons grew more circumspect. He only returned to the subject late in the year, when the trials were already drawing increasing dissent. And his pamphlet – again insisting that spectral evidence might only show the devil’s fakery – was published anonymously.
Willard’s alertness to the risk of demonic lies and deception had very likely prevented an outbreak of accusations and trials in Groton. His refusal to accept Elizabeth Knapp’s self-condemnation due to contradictory evidence very likely saved her from disgrace and even execution. Had such notions been general in 1692, the Salem outbreak could never have expanded to such tragic dimensions. But Willard’s views were far from universal in that year – so much so, that even he found it unsafe to own them publicly. Only in the aftermath of the panic, as the province awoke in horror to what it had done, would Willard’s caution become commonplace.
Others would have to wait for the ideas and the attitudes that saved Elizabeth Knapp.
Notes:
(10) Knapp might have been suggesting evasion here. But, though she referred to attending school at Willard’s house, it is plausible that she genuinely could not write. Many New England women of this era were taught to read, but not to write, and many could not sign their names. See Gloria Main, “An Inquiry into When and Why Women Learned to Write in Colonial New England,” Journal of Social History, vol. 24, no. 3 (1991), pp. 579-589.
(11) For the former, see Demos, Entertaining Satan; for the latter, see Carol Karlsen, The Devil in the Shape of a Woman: Witchcraft in Colonial New England, Norton, 1987.
(12) Samuel Willard, “Useful Instructions for a Professing People in Times of Great Security and Degeneracy,” Cambridge, 1673.
(13) For Willard’s involvement in the Salem panic, see (among others) Norton, In the Devil’s Snare, pp. 201-03, 215-16, 224-25, 237, 280-82.