Her Peaceable Carriage

What Salem Village says to us today

The temperatures outside are below freezing, and I’m inside on this January morning reading from a copy of Charles W. Upham’s Salem Witchcraft; with An Account of Salem Village and A History of Opinions on Witchcraft and Kindred Subjects—an ostentatious title, for sure.

It was published in Boston in 1867, and this particular copy was donated to the Harvard College Library in 1907 from the estate of Professor E. W. Gurney. It was dedicated to Oliver Wendell Holmes, then professor of anatomy and physiology at Harvard.

“Although this aged matron and excellent Christian lady was convicted and sentenced to death,” Upham wrote of Mary Bradbury, my tenth great-grandmother, “it is most satisfactory to find that she escaped from prison, and her life was saved.”

Over the past few weeks, I’ve been exploring this woman, thinking about her. History comes close when I think on her, and the Salem Witch Trials, which seem distant and abstract now, a few paragraphs in a history book, suddenly come close. Of course I’m not the only one descended from Mary—another reader told me her husband was, as well.

Just about a year ago, Alexandra Pecci published an article in Yankee—she, too, is a descendant. She makes a point of several things that make Mary an exception. For one, she escaped the gallows, and as she points out, one of the main beliefs was that Mary’s family bribed the jailor, which allowed her to be secreted away to Maine for a time.

She points to Mercy Lewis, a teenager who was traumatized repeatedly through her life—her family were refugees from attacks by Native Americans during King Philip’s War, and she later lost family members, including both parents, to attacks. Mercy claimed that Mistress Bradbury was “baptized by the serpent at Newbury Falls.” Another source—the Salem Witch Museum—says it was Richard Carrier who made this claim. Apparently, both he and his mother, Martha, were in jail at the time, themselves accused of witchcraft.

Mary had also been accused of making butter rancid on a ship’s voyage (she churned and sold butter, a successful enterprise for her); of turning into an attacking blue boar; of afflicting unto death a young man. It is possible that the whole trouble began with unrequited love.

The accusations against Mary Bradbury came largely from the Carr family, who themselves were early settlers to Salisbury (where the Bradbury’s were prominent figures) and lived close to Mary on the Mudnock Road.

Richard Carr had made the accusation that Mary Bradbury, in the form of a “blue boar,” attacked his father, George, while astride his horse. Melissa Berry, in Genealogy Magazine, wrote that Mary had spurned George’s proposal of marriage years before, one of those buried facts that history tends to winnow out in favor of large narratives. The Carr clan was spiteful and carried the grudge for decades.

One of the girls, Ann Putnam, Jr., was among the “afflicted girls” that Mary tortured. The girl’s mother was Ann Carr Putnam, clearly a spiteful woman. And her husband, Thomas Putnam, was in charge of recording depositions. His handwritten documents survive.

Further, Mary’s daughter Jane had likewise declined the advances of John Carr. Apparently, the heartbroken man withered away and ultimately died. Among the accusations of the child Ann was that she saw the ghost of John, wrapped in a sheet, saying that Mary had killed him.

In writing about Mary in this section, I want to diverge from mere history and instead look at not only what happened but how it relates to us, today, the descendants of these people. First, the obvious question: have we learned?

I myself will admit that I have resented others. I continue to hold grudges. Why do I do this? I’ve been rejected by women, my own offers turned away. It made me angry. I withered, too. But on whose account? The people whose backs were turned to me? To what extent was I responsible for my own grim attitude?

I have a question: what is it we are hiding within our history?

The town of Salem Village is now known as Danvers, and its archivist is Richard Trask. Alexandra Pecci, in her Yankee essay, quotes Trask as saying that, at least in the decades before I was born, the 50’s and 60’s, one didn’t speak of the trials “in polite society.” In 1970, the year I was born, he led an archaeology team and excavated the original Salem Village Parsonage.

What we do not discourse about in polite society, and what needs to be excavated, is the fact of the rage that drives us. The same hunger for power that drove the clergy and the judges. The same desire for vengeance, to hurt, and to inflict. Greed, envy. Ignorance.

To admit to the witch trials is to admit that humans are infallible, imperfect, if not animalistic. It seems ridiculous, even quaint, to forgive a people I can hardly imagine for their persecution of a woman some thirteen generations in my past. I, like any of the thousands of her descendants, would be unrecognizable to her.

In the letter signed by 115 of her friends and neighbors, the signatories referred to Mary’s “courteous and peaceable disposition and carriage.” It carried no weight with the judges. And later, when it all had blown over, Mary’s descendants were offered a mere twenty English pounds by way of apology. It’s like the old American ploy: throw money at a problem and hope it goes away.

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January is coming to a close. For the most part, Winter Storm Blair is behind us, though the roads are still glazed here and there with rutted ice, piles of black snow at the curbs. Temperatures dropped all the way to a single degree Fahrenheit. As far as the weather goes, the worst is behind us.

But as far as what we see happening in the country—in our village—stands before us and all around us. I think back to my tenth great-grandmother, an indisputable pillar of her community, languishing in a jail at the age of seventy-seven. I think of the hangings she would have by then been aware of.

What fear, what outrage and incredulity she must have felt. And not only her, but others in the villages of Massachusetts. Her husband, the captain. Her children, one of whom—Wymond, her oldest—I’m descended from, though he seems to have died in the West Indies long before this incident. But his son, my ancestor the Reverend Wymond Bradbury, who’d worked as a cooper, was in Salisbury at the time. He would have known.

It’s not too much—not even in polite society—to think on these people and the injustices that blot our early history and, for me at least, my history. We would not want this, of course, to happen again.