When I was writing the Theodore Bilbo piece a couple of months back, I read an account of a lynching that sorta stuck with me. The boy who got lynched was named Lloyd Clay; he was a good sort of fellow. He came from a family of barbers. A white girl had claimed that a black man had come into her bedroom and had attempted assault; Clay was detained by the sheriff and put in a lineup. On viewing the lineup, the girl said that it wasn't him. The police decided to detain him overnight, pending investigation; I could see that being as much for his own safety as anything else, especially given what followed. But when that cell door clanged shut that night, Clay had reason to be cautiously optimistic. Even in 1919 Mississippi, even there, there was a good chance Clay was on his road to exoneration.
Then, in the account, the mob that had gathered outside broke into the jail despite the extra deputies, and took Clay, and my heart sank. There was a sickening feeling that things were going off the rails, and they were. Clay was lynched that night. The girl was brought before him and bullied--peer pressure from a baying, torchlit mob would be at least a mild form of bullying, and she caved*. She reluctantly identified Clay, sealing his fate. He died protesting that it wasn't him.
This was a crime and a miscarriage of justice, one drop amid the large, terrible lake that constituted race relations in the South of that time. But Clay's detention had been going well. I am not saying the Sheriff was Atticus Finch or anything, but the kid had a chance. He'd already basically been cleared. He would get, even there, even then, due process. Which is why my guts froze when I came to the part where the mob pulled Clay screaming from his cell.
The expectation of justice, which Lloyd Clay was denied that night, is how we are supposed to feel, about our courts, our police and our legal system. The integrity and impartiality of the Justice system is one of the linchpins holding our civil society together. I am sure we can all think of times that justice was not done--politicians of both parties getting away with mishandling classified intelligence in a way that would get me years in the stockade is just one example that springs to mind--but overall, I think most of us sort of expect the justice system to be mostly fair, mostly impartial, most of the time.
But there have been times, and places, where this was not true. This series is about American evil, which is why I will not dwell on the Moscow show trials, the Star Chamber, or the Nuremberg laws. But history is blotted by occasions when your blood would run just as cold to be in the hands of the (so-called) legitimate justice system as Lloyd Clay's did that night in 1919 when he was pulled from his bunk.
The US Justice system has, on the whole, been pretty good; marred by the occasional Korematsu decision and such forehead slappers as Buck vs Bell and Dred Scott, but overall...not bad. But here, as with my cult leaders, I picked one prize asshole to stand in for many. But before I introduce you to this disgrace of a jurist, I need to set the stage a bit. So let's talk about the Salem Witch Trials.
The Salem Witch Trials are sort of the inverse of the Jack the Ripper thing. Oceans of ink have been spilled over the doings at Salem township in 1692-3, where a community was convulsed by paranoia and superstition, and 35 (ish) unfortunates paid with their lives. To put that in perspective though, little Switzerland put to death about 2500 witches. Scotland accounted for another 5000. And Germany, efficient as always, worked their way through another 25,000. So the events at Salem surely pale in comparison...but they were grim enough, to those that were there.
And it was a grim world, the Salem of 1692. Smallpox had run through the native population, decimating it, and making those dark, lonely menacing forests even more lonely. There on the edge of a very dark, very forbidding continent, a small handful of colonists attempted to scratch out a meagre livelihood, isolated and alone, and far from the civilization which bore them.
Their numbers were so small. The entire population of Salem Township was smaller than my high school; the entire Massachusetts colony held a population comparable to the college I graduated from. There was a sense of isolation, a silence, most people today could barely grasp. The normal, day-to-day life of these people was as austere and isolated as an outward bound camping trip. When they heard a noise at night, they must have prayed it was a wild animal. What remained of the native tribes at this point were still very restless, very pissed off, and not above the occasional raid and massacre.
In addition to isolation and hardship sufficient to work even the most iron nerves, most of these people we would now consider unhinged religious fanatics. Even those of us moderns that believe in God carry a pretty hefty payload of skepticism, courtesy of the scientific method and a culture that has been broadly suspicious of superstition for going on 300 years. It is one thing to imagine the Devil, while scrolling through your phone sipping a Frappuccino at Starbucks like a good modern skeptic and quite another to feel him near, as your family huddles in darkness as you read the Bible (the only book in the house) by rush light. The powers and principalities of the air were as real to them as the war in Ukraine is to you--something horrible that you have heard and read about and are pretty certain actually exists, but thank god, has not yet found its way to your door. A witch is a Halloween joke to most of us moderns**, but in 1692, they were terrifying in ways we find it very difficult to understand today***
Piled on top of the isolation and the superstition were the normal sorts of festering interpersonal resentments that tend to crop up in a community of that size. To read the lead up to the Salem Witch Trials is to know exactly what that nasty HOA secretary who insisted that your garage door was not regulation taupe was doing in the seventeenth century. The inhabitants of Salem were the customary breed of good and less good, kind and selfish, that most people in most places are. But there was enough of a leavening of pretty bad sorts that they helped set the stage for what was to come.
Smack dab in the middle of it all, was a group of four young girls who began stirring the pot in earnest. Added into the formidable isolation, the petty resentments and an almost fanatical belief in the supernatural, you introduce new elements: hysteria, moral panic, and social contagion. Over and over again, these girls leveled terrible accusations of witchcraft at neighbors and friends.
I am attempting an essay here, not a book; so I will largely skip over the key questions about why these girls did what they did, and how the trials unfolded. I am more interested in another question: Why did the authorities take these four girls seriously? These were young girls, ranging in age from nine to 17. Three of the four were 12 or under. There was no empirical evidence backing up any of these accusations. Doctors examined these girls and found nothing physically wrong with them. Yet somehow, in that terrifying way crowds have--something Lloyd Clay knew to his great woe--the prevailing feeling curdled into paranoia, superstition and hysteria.
These cases were formally prosecuted by the Court of Oyer and Terminer (to hear and determine, according to its Anglo-French roots) with the (not really) honorable William Sloughton presiding. And we come at last to our awful American, who was the chief magistrate of this travesty.
The first case was comparatively easy. Bridget Bishop wore bright colors and ran a tavern, and might or might not have sported a third nipple****, all clear signs of witchcraft, are they not? They hung her; but before proceeding with the growing number of accused, they wrote to the leading religious authorities of the colonies to seek advice on how to proceed.
Cotton Mather, whose Wonders of the Invisible World survives, wrote a cagey 'to be sure' letter that was an awkward straddle between enjoining the tribunal to prosecute god's enemies, but also see justice done and prosecute no-one unfairly. A more mealy-mouthed, cover-your-ass document you will rarely see. Collectively, the men of God were inconclusive in their recommendations, so William Sloughton took it upon himself to push forward with prosecution. In order to secure convictions for crimes for which there was no tangible proof, Sloughton authorized the court to rely heavily on Spectral Evidence.
Spectral evidence basically means convicting a person because another person claimed to have a vision of them committing witchcraft. If that sounds daft and irrefutable to you, that is because it is (a) daft and (b) irrefutable. Spectral evidence was looked upon with some suspicion at the time, but before you start breathing that sigh of relief, it is worth pointing out that this was because there was a hot dispute about whether the devil could appear as a virtuous Christian without their permission. Yep, the life and death issue was whether Old Scratch could rock that polymorph self spell. That spectral evidence was fucking insane really didn't enter into it much. 79 of the 156 people charged at Salem were charged on the basis of spectral evidence alone.
About this time it is worth mentioning Major Nathaniel Saltonstall, one of the other magistrates at these proceedings. He resigned during the initial Bishop prosecution, being deeply dissatisfied with the nature of the proceedings. Saltonstall and his integrity stand out like a light in a dark room...but no one else resigned. The consensus held, and prosecution proceeded.
And proceed it did. People always associate Witch Trials with burning, but all the Salem witches were hanged. Well, all except Giles Corey, who was treated to a mediaeval little wonder called Peine Forte et Dure, which means that he got pressed to death under a pile of rocks. It took three days.
If you have the stomach for it, the trials make for interesting reading, but for our purposes, the takeaway is this. After half a year, the frenzy began to die down. When the court reconvened in Spring of 1693, they had new guidance from the governor that spectral evidence was in itself insufficient for conviction. New accusations were now greeted with a modicum of skepticism, enough to sort of break the momentum of the thing. The court concluded its work in May 1693, when the colonial governor issued a blanket pardon. But the butcher's bill was considerable. 20 people had been executed; perhaps another dozen had died in prison, including a couple of infants born to the accused witches. More than 100 accused witches were either not convicted or were pardoned; which had to make for awkward meetings in the streets when they ran into their accusers.
Like a booze-fueled spring-break hookup, buyers remorse set in soon thereafter. The proceedings, particularly the reliance on spectral evidence, was attacked almost immediately; Cotton and Increase Mather would fight an unsuccessful rear-guard action defending the increasingly discredited idea of spectral evidence for another decade, but by 1696, certain jurors were asking for forgiveness for their part in the proceedings. In January 1697, a fast day was held to solemnize the tragedy, and people were already writing in terms of 'blame and shame' about the late trials. One of the other judges was also stricken with conscience, asking forgiveness for his role in the business of the court.
But not so Judge Sloughton.
William Sloughton, Harvard Class of 1650--apparently dogmatic, rigid ideologues have a long and storied provenance there--had a pretty normal sort of trajectory, for an achievement-driven religious striver. He made money, sought influence, administered laws, and otherwise was pretty indistinguishable from dozens of other colonial administrators whose stars were on the rise. He never married or had children. Apart from his role in the witch trials, he did nothing conspicuously evil in all his life.
But he lived long enough to see spectral evidence discredited by many, and yet he never wavered in his assertion that justice was done at Salem. Never a bit of doubt, never a hint of contrition. He lived another nine years--affluent, powerful, honored. Stoughton, Massachusetts was named after him, as is Stoughton Hall in the Harvard Yard.
Stoughton did not live an evil life, but he did an evil, evil thing. And whatever his conscience might have whispered to him, alone at night, staring into a flickering hearth fire, he never had the courage to publicly confront his actions, to reconsider when new evidence presented itself, or even when the hysteria passed. He doubled down on his contemptible mockery of justice, because he lacked the integrity to interrogate his assumptions, understand his own motivated reasoning or do any of the things a wise or trustworthy jurist should when confronted by uncertainty and conflicting evidence. He took the simple way, the easy way, the way of blood, the way of the mob, and made the trials at Salem a byword for injustice. The shudder we feel when imagining such proceedings speaks to the interest we all have in ensuring our justice system is impartial, fair and just. Its reliability and impartiality is the only thing standing between us and horrors we have almost forgotten and rarely like to think about. Like so many of our institutions, it is precious, and more fragile than it looks. If you feel inclined, join me in a prayer--pray that our justice system doesn't see too many more William Sloughtons.
Up next: The Copperhead.
t
* I recently ran across a thing called moral injury, which is when you do a thing that is so bad in it's moral nature that it pretty much ruins you. Its a thing you see in the military sometimes--especially in the aftermath of our more serious wars. A lot of the veterans of WWII in the Pacific, and the Vietnam war, to name two, just sort of came home and quietly drank themselves to death. They couldn't always live with what they did.
I think about this girl, who got browbeaten into accusing Lloyd Clay. Mattie Hudson was her name. Talk about moral injury, that's a doozy. I wonder how you live with something like that?
** Think for example of the witch, the vampire, and the werewolf. The latter two are neutered Universal Horror monsters, laughingstocks of Twilight and Hotel Transylvania, and the Witch is not even that scary. You read old folklore, or even older novels, and instead of a twee Robert Pattinson, Nosferatu was fucking terrifying, rat-like and unclean, the dark fruit of a corrupted tomb. I think (in part, there is a whole sexual subtext that is an entirely different kettle of fish) the vampire stood in for the fear of sudden inexplicable illness and death, much as the werewolf reflected the fear--almost unknown to us now--of being prey. The astonishing layers of insulation we have, from the natural world, from death, from inexplicable illness, they have defanged our bogeymen almost completely. What will take their place?
*** Unless of course, you are a Saudi …
**** Some absolutely archetypical sexism here; Bishop was an outsider who had been a bit morally suspect--the bitch wore clothes that weren’t black, and she ran a tavern to boot. String her up! It got trickier, though, with the next tranche of victims; Rebecca Nurse was devout and humble and walked in the way of the lord and all that good stuff--which didn't count for much when a quartet of pissy little girls decide that you have been afflicting them, I guess. Nurse was hung. And since I could find no other way to work in this bit of weird-as-hell folklore, here is the Bell Witch. See ya next time.
Hey t! This is great. It sent me down some rabbit holes of history, which is fun (i.e., https://www.britannica.com/event/dancing-plague-of-1518), particularly because I did think at least a few witches were burned at the stake. And they were, but not in Salem, as you described. I appreciate your discussion on moral injury, which apparently escaped Judge Sloughton.