"The Testimony of William Carr, aged forty-one, or thereabouts, is that my brother John Carr, when he was young, was a man of as good capacity as most men of his age; but falling in love with Jane True (now wife of Captain John March), and my father being persuaded by [——] of the family (which I shall not name) not to let him marry so young, my father would not give him a portion, whereupon the match broke off, which my brother laid so much to heart that he grew melancholy, and by degrees much crazed, not being the man, that he was before, to his dying day.
"I do further testify that my said brother was sick about a fortnight or three weeks, and then died; and I was present with him when he died. And I do affirm that he died peaceably and quietly, never manifesting the least trouble in the world about anybody, nor did not say any thing of Mrs. Bradbury nor anybody else doing him hurt; and yet I was with him till the breath and life were out of his body."
The usual form, jurat in curia, is written at the foot of this deposition, but evidently by a much later hand; and this leads me to mention the improbability that any testimony in favor of the accused ever reached the Court at the trials. They had no counsel: the attorney-general had prejudged all the cases; and his mind and those of the judges repudiated utterly any thing like an investigation. Every friendly voice was silenced. The doors were closed against the defence. Robert Pike, an assistant under the old and a councillor under the new government, endeavored in vain to enter them.
William Carr was a person of great respectability, and bore the appointment, by the General Court, of land-surveyor for the towns in the northern part of the present county of Essex.
The member of the family who—as stated in the foregoing deposition—prevented the match, all the circumstances seem to indicate, was Mrs. Ann Putnam. She perhaps had experienced the effects of a too early marriage, bringing the burden of life upon the constitution and the character before they are mature enough to bear it. She may have attributed to this cause the troubles and trials with which her cup had been so bitterly filled, and the blasting of the happiness of her youth. Half deranged, as perpetual excitement from the parish quarrels in reference to Mr. Bayley had made her, she may have become morbidly opposed to the equally early marriage of a brother. Added to this was the fact that Henry True had married one of Mrs. Bradbury's daughters, and that Jane True was his sister. It cannot be doubted that she entertained the same ideas about Mrs. Bradbury as her father and brothers, James and Richard; and, for this reason, also opposed the match of her brother John. Wishing to be relieved from the self-reproach of having caused his derangement and death, when the witchcraft delusion broke out at Salem Village and she became wholly absorbed by it, as all other deaths and misfortunes were ascribed to it, she avowed and maintained the belief, as some had suspected at the time, that the happiness, health, reason, and life of her brother had been destroyed by diabolical agency, practised by Mrs. Bradbury.
In the state of things long subsisting between the Bradbury and Carr families, we find an explanation of the movement made against Mrs. Bradbury. Young Ann Putnam may have often heard her unpleasantly spoken of by her mother, and it was natural that she should have "cried out against her."
The family of Mrs. Ann Putnam seem to have had constitutional traits that illustrate and explain her own character and conduct. They were excitable and sensitive to an extraordinary degree. Their judgment, reason, and physical systems, were subject to the power of their fancies and affections. One of her brothers, in consequence of being badly coquetted with and jilted by a young widow, was thrown into an awful condition of body and mind "for about three-quarters of a year." The reason, health, and heart of another were broken; and he sunk into an early grave, in consequence of having been crossed in love. The death of her sister Bayley may have been caused by the unhappy controversies in the village parish. We have seen, and shall see, the all but maniac condition to which excitement brought her own mind. At last, the heaviest blow that can fall upon a fond wife suddenly snapped the brittle cord of her life. These considerations must be borne in mind, while we attempt to explain her conduct, and should throw the weight of pity and charity into the scales, if mortal judgment ventures to estimate her guilt. They are known to the Infinite Mind, and never overlooked by divine mercy.
I have introduced these singular private details to illustrate what the documents all along show,—that the proceedings against persons charged with witchcraft, in 1692, were instigated by all sorts of personal grudges and private piques, many of them of long standing, fomented and kept alive by an unhappy indulgence of unworthy feelings, always ready to mix themselves with popular excitements, and leading all concerned headlong to the utmost extent of mischief and wrong.
The case of Mary Bradbury has been allowed to occupy so large a space, because I desire to disabuse the public mind of a great error on this subject. It has been too much supposed, that the sufferers in the witchcraft delusion were generally of the inferior classes of society, and particularly ignorant and benighted. They were the very reverse. They mostly belonged to families in the better conditions of life, and, many of them, to the highest social level. They were all persons of great moral firmness and rectitude, as was demonstrated by their bearing under persecutions and outrage, and when confronting the terrors of death. Their names do not deserve reproach, and their memories ought to be held in honor.
The following account of the examination of Elizabeth Cary of Charlestown, given by her husband, Captain Cary, a shipmaster, has the highest interest, as written at the time by one who was an eye-witness, and participated in the sufferings of the occasion:—