02: Fourth Time’s The Charm

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A PRODUCT OF THE WHISPERFORGE: SOUND & STORY, BROUGHT TO LIFE

[[Theme music: “Lakeside Path” by Blue Dot Sessions]]

KATE: Hello, and welcome to Remarkable Providences: the podcast about messy ministers, parishes and pariahs, and, of course, the Salem Witch Trials. I’m your tour guide, Kate Devorak. Last week, I talked about Salem Village’s struggle for their own parish, and the revolving door of ministers that had landed them in a tricky situation. They were a community divided, hoping for a new leader for their church who would bring with him a sense of harmony and unity. Unfortunately for them, they got Samuel Parris.

[[MUSIC: Upbeat]]

Samuel Parris was born in London, England in 1653 to a fairly well-off merchant family. His father, Thomas, owned a plantation in Barbados, which is where the family moved soon after Samuel’s birth. When he was seventeen years old, Samuel was sent to Massachusetts Bay Colony in order to study ministry at Harvard, probably with his uncle who had moved to become the minister of Boston’s First Church. He was expected to complete his course of study in seven years, but he suddenly left about three years in when his father died, leaving his son the entire Barbados estate. So Parris decided to abandon his religious education to try his hand at being a merchant. And he failed miserably. There’s a quote from Emerson W. Baker’s “A Storm of Witchcraft” that I am very, very fond of. Baker writes that, quote “under most circumstances about the only thing that kept a Barbados sugar plantation owner from amassing substantial wealth was death from tropical disease.”

So what went wrong? That’s up to some debate. Some historians suggest that the plantation was destroyed by a hurricane in 1675, but records show it to be running as late as 1679. Others blame the declining price of sugar. Or Parris could have simply been in over his head as a young man with no formal training in plantation management or trade. Who’s to say?

He ended up selling the property around 1680 or 1681, and returning to Boston. Around this time he married Elizabeth Eldridge, who was a few years older than him, because she’s a cougar and can get it, ya know? Ya probably wouldn’t know, actually. We don’t know that much about her. She stays pretty much out of the picture throughout the witch trials, and most records of her detail her marriage and the births of her respective children.

Though as a side note–Samuel Parris is one of the few people involved in the witch trials with a surviving portrait. And unfortunately… he’s kinda hot. I’ll include it in the show notes. You decide.

Anyway, their first child, Thomas, was born in 1681, followed by a daughter named Elizabeth, also called Betty, in 1682. They had another child, Susanna, in 1688. Around this time, Parris also took in Abigail Williams. Her origins are not exactly clear, though she is described in records as his niece. This wasn’t an uncommon practice at this time, for families to take in children whose parents were out of the picture for whatever reason, whether they were related by blood or not. Sometimes these young people would be taken on as servants, but Abigail Williams appears to be more of a ward, and therefore treated as another one of the Parris children. The Parris household also included two enslaved people, a married couple called John and Tituba Indian, who did most of the domestic duties. I’ll talk more about John and Tituba’s origins in a later episode, but we do know that they were included in the Parris unit when Samuel moved the family to Salem Village.

Samuel Parris had arrived in Boston in order to revitalize his career as a merchant after the failure of his plantation. He bought property, a shop, a house, and part of the wharf from one Richard Harris to get started. He later borrowed more money from Harris to purchase goods to start his mercantile business. And then a year later Harris sued Samuel Parris to recover the loan because he couldn't pay him back. It seems that business was not Parris’ forte.

To be fair, he didn’t exactly have the training for it. He essentially had less than half of a divinity degree when he was handed a new opportunity on a platter when his father died. When that venture dried up, he thought the best idea would be to continue it in a different, more competitive location. When at first you don’t succeed, fail somewhere else.

At some point in the 80s, with business definitely not booming, he decided to throw his buckled hat back in the ministry ring. He took a short term position as reverend of the frontier town of Stowe, Massachusetts in 1685, while still maintaining his business in Boston, and he realized that he could make a better life as a man of God. He started doing temp ministry gigs around Massachusetts, in small towns and frontier villages.

And he was decent. We still have a good deal of Parris’ writing, including sermons and notes, as well as town records. Looking at these, I do have to admit that he did know what he’s talking about, in a way. He definitely knew his Bible. And he knew how to rile up a congregation. During this time, he caught the attention of Salem Village. Samuel Parris was looking for a stable position, and Salem Village was looking for...essentially a warm, literate body. Which is music to Samuel Parris’ ears.

[[MUSIC: Uncertain]]

In November of 1688, he met with the Village committee to discuss an employment opportunity. He gave a sermon there on November 25th, and the congregation decided “by general vote” to offer him the position. But Parris did not respond until December 10th, when the committee made another formal offer–he would consider it. Thus began a nearly year-long negotiation process. Parris was, after all, a businessman and, at least in his mind, an artful negotiator. In April of 1689, the Village again approached Parris with an offer of a 60 pound annual salary, one third of which would be paid in money and the rest in corn and other provisions.

To give some context, this had been the going rate for the Village’s previous pastors. Comparatively, Salem Town’s reverend John Higginson was receiving 100 pounds a year plus 40 cords of firewood. John Hale of Beverly’s salary started at 70 pounds in 1664. The reverend of Topsfield was getting 75 pounds, so Salem Village was at the low end of the spectrum. But with his appointment, Parris was also going to be ordained, and receive the power and privileges that went along with that. Plus, he and his family would live in the parsonage, rent free.

Parris countered with an additional list of demands. While he accepted the offered salary, he asked that he be considered for a raise if the Village became more prosperous (though he also conceded to a pay cut if conditions worsened). He wanted control over the quality and quantity of provisions he received, demanding that he get what he needed to support himself and his family according to his salary at the time of his appointment, regardless of the item’s price at a later date. Since the colony was at war at this point, this was Parris’ attempt to protect himself from inflation. He asked that his salary be collected from the families who lived within the Village borders, and that any contributions he may receive from members of the congregation coming from other communities would be considered a bonus on top of the 60 pounds per year (something which, Parris noted, had been granted to Deodat Lawson). Last but not least, he demanded that he be given firewood, for free, in addition to his agreed salary.

These would be the topic of debate at the May 18th Village meeting. Concerns were raised over the issue of firewood, since Salem Village did not have as much common land as other towns from which to collect wood. The question of payment from out of town parishioners was also on the table. In the end, according to Parris, the Village agreed to two big compromises–the first, which would be tested for one year, that a firewood stipend be added to Parris’s salary in lieu of physical wood. Secondly, that it would be up to the out of towners to decide whether their donations went towards Parris’s salary or made up a bonus.

But when the contract was officially put into writing in June, Parris was not present, and several of his demands were left ambiguous, most importantly concerning the firewood. This incident may shed some light into Parris’s failings as a businessman.

[[MUSIC: Quirky]]

Parris spent so much time going back and forth with the Village to negotiate the conditions of his appointment, but when the time came to officially seal the deal, he could not be bothered to be there for it, which in the end, really screwed him over.

Then, in a move that would only ramp up discord in the community, Parris also demanded to take ownership of the parsonage and the surrounding land. Which was wild. That land, along with that surrounding the meetinghouse, were the only plots that the Village was granted control over by the Town. In fact, the Village had passed a law back in 1682 that made it illegal for the committee to sell or gift the parsonage to anyone. But on October 10th, 1689, in an act of desperation, the Village committee all but unanimously voted to grant Parris and his heirs the deed to the parsonage and its lands. The men who were instrumental in orchestrating this turnover were Nathaniel Ingersoll, Nathaniel Putnam, John Putnam, Jonathan Walcott, and Thomas Flint (the latter two connected to the Putnams through marriage).

On November 19th, after nearly a year of negotiation, Samuel Parris, a Harvard dropout and failed businessman, was fully ordained as a Puritan minister. Parris, his wife, and 27 other saints signed the covenant that officially created a Church in the Village. Salem Village was one step closer to a break from Salem Town and, hopefully, some semblance of harmony. In a sense, Parris and the Village were a match made in heaven. Both were small timers with big dreams, second raters living in the shadows of more successful entities. Ordination Day was meant to be one of hope, one that would provide both Salem Farms and the new minister with a second, well, fourth chance at making it. What most everyone somehow failed to notice that day, however, was that the union between the Village and Parris would lead to mutually assured destruction.

[[MUSIC: Somber]]

Surface level: Samuel Parris has a lot in common with the Village’s previous pastors. He’s a Harvard guy, like Bailey and Burroughs. He tried his hand in commercial ventures like Lawson. He started in smaller, rural communities, like the rest. But Samuel Parris is different. He’s different because he sucks, and I hate him.

[[Music stops.]]

Ok, I know, I can’t truly hate someone I’ve never met who died almost 300 years ago. And yet, here we are. I’m trying my darndest to give y’all the facts as impartially as I can, but sometimes (a bunch of the time), that’s going to slip. I’m not a journalist. I’m an amateur historian on the internet with an RSS feed. And boy, this guy...this guy just grinds my gears.

[[MUSIC: Quirky]]

Here’s the thing about Samuel Parris: he thinks that he is so smart and so slick. But what he didn’t realize is that he had found himself in a one-sided battle of wits with no one. He knew what the situation in the Village was. That’s clear from the negotiation process. He knew that the Village was desperate enough for a minister that he could get anything he wanted. He knew that he could wait out the committee with his demands because there was literally no one else willing to take the job. He kept up on the Village’s reputation and also the deals they had struck with their previous ministers. He thought he could strike a sweet deal where he would be taken care of, and on top of that, finally get the respect and influence he’d been so hungry for all his life. Here he was, a college drop out, a failed merchant who had relatively little ministry experience, about to be the first fully ordained minister of the suburb of Salem Town. Because the Village was desperate and everyone hated each other, he became one of the most powerful men in the community. But he was also a dumb narcissist who thought that what happened with the other ministers wouldn’t happen to him. And if we’ve learned anything at this point, one should never underestimate the pettiness of the Salem Villagers.

Looking at the signers of the Salem Village covenant, we can see that this move was not as unifying as people had hoped it would be. Of the 27 new members, 16 were from just two families who owned most of the land on the west side of the Village, 12 of them belonging to the Putnam clan. No one from the Porter clan, the prominent family owning much of the east side, signed up for the new church, choosing instead to remain saints within the Salem Town congregation. We’ll get into the Porters and the Putnams and all their drama in a later episode, but for now, trust me when I say that this was a Big Deal–a clear sign of the conflict ready to bubble over in the Village.

Things started to go downhill for Parris pretty much as soon as he started. By the next village meeting, just shy of one month since Parris’s ordination day, the constable was ordered to collect the minister’s salary from thirty eight families who had failed to pay. Now, this could be seen as a sign of resistance to Parris’s appointment, but it should also be said that at this point the colony was in the midst of a long and costly war in the north, which resulted in higher taxes throughout the region, and maybe the families who had not pitched in for the minister’s salary had done so because they could not afford to. Or maybe more than a few were less than enthused with Parris’s approach to the church.

Although the number of church members doubled in his first year as minister, Parris did not make it easy. He rejected the Halfway Covenant that had been adopted by most of the surrounding towns, which loosened the rules of church membership and specifically baptism, one of the big rites of passage into the religion. For those who are familiar with Catholicism–it’s kind of like Vatican II. It was supposed to be the funky fresh new Puritan Church all your friends are joining. An issue the colony as a whole had been facing since its establishment was dwindling numbers of saints and decreased church attendance. Which did not look good for the City Upon a Hill. Pro tip about religion: you gotta get butts in seats. A good way to do that is to open baptism to everyone, not just the children of full church members.

Another key aspect of the Halfway Covenant was the way that it dealt with the confession of sins. I was raised Catholic, and we were introduced to Confession around 3rd grade, and it always freaked me out. In Catholicism, confession is the deal where you go into a phone booth sized box and talk supposedly anonymously with a priest, tell them about all the bad or morally wonky things you’ve done, the priest gives you prayer homework and maybe some life advice, then you go on your merry way feeling that God has absolved you of said sins until next time. Clean slate. And I’m not trying to knock that, but for me personally, as a nervous child who has grown into an anxious adult, the idea of having to go in and tell a strange dude about all the bad things I’ve done was more than a bit harrowing.

In Puritanism, confession was basically the same principle, only you do it in front of everyone you know. Traditionally, Puritans deal in public confessions, where you would present yourself to the congregation (essentially the whole community if you’re living in the colony), confess your sins, members of the community would testify for or against you, and then the minister would tell you whether or not you were forgiven. This was a big deal. Publicly owning up to your wrongs was very important to the whole operation, but it was also, as some can probably imagine, incredibly daunting. So the Halfway Covenant introduced the idea of private confession in order to make the whole thing a bit more comfortable and inviting. And Samuel Parris and the new village church threw that right out the window.

Sticking hard and fast to tradition, predictably, threw a wrench into Parris’ plans to expand the church. By his second year, only seven people became full members of the church, and more and more villagers were skipping out on weekly sermons, some saints going so far as to not show up for communion, a super important, required sacrament that was celebrated every six weeks and reserved for full members. Those 38 families withholding taxes still had not contributed to Parris’ salary, and their ranks were growing.

[[MUSIC: Reflective]]

Parris may have also turned off many of the parishioners with his particular religious flavor. He may have been an incompetent jerk, but I must admit the man knew his scripture. Looking at his sermons, we can pick up on some of his favorite themes, namely: war and deceit. His obsession with people not being what they seem shows up in his very first sermon after his ordination, in which he quoted, “Cursed be he that doeth the work of the Lord deceitfully.” This theme that no one is free from sin will come up again and again in the years leading up to the witch trials, which only amps up once the witch hunt is in full swing.

To be fair, the idea that anyone is susceptible to the devil’s wiles was a favorite topic of reverends across the board. Nobody’s perfect. Even the saints have no definite guarantee of salvation. But there’s a healthy dose of paranoia in Parris’ writings. No one can truly be trusted. Evil can lie behind even the most innocent or pious of facades. No one is safe. The devil and his minions are out there, behind every tree, walking the streets of Salem Town, sitting beside you in the meetinghouse, maybe even lurking in your own home. And these fiends are out to destroy the church any way that they can. By blatantly committing sin, or encouraging sinful behaviour in others, by perverting the values all good Christians hold dear, by turning their backs on their neighbors or refusing to honor the Sabbath… or dishonoring the church by not paying their pastor.

Parris sees himself as a Christ-like figure, a stand in for the capital-C Church. And the Church is under attack. Given that at this time the colony was at war (a very long, very costly war with seemingly no end in sight), the militant nature of these sermons would make sense. Write what you know, read the room, you know? But in Samuel Parris’s case, it feels more personal, especially as his tenure as Village reverend progresses.

[[MUSIC: Somber]]

It’s easy to read his tirades about the eternal battle between the devil and the church and see between the lines the war that Parris feels he is waging, between himself and those in the community out to destroy him. His sermons are a call to arms. Ok, there’s one quote from one of his sermons in 1691 that I particularly like–“The Lord said unto my Lord, sit thou at my right hand, until I make thine enemies thy footstool.”–Which gives us a taste of his alarmist style, but is also, admittedly, pretty hardcore. Maybe Parris’s intention with this approach was to try to unite the people of Salem Village on a religious front instead of attempting to fix the civil unrest… but if that’s the case, he definitely falls flat. If anything he increased the paranoia and distrust amongst neighbors in an exciting new way–by bringing the devil into the fray. And just replace “sinners” in our midst with “witches”, and you can see how things could break bad very quickly.

Plus he kept complaining about how the meetinghouse needed improvements and how he wanted fancy new furnishings for the communion table, and like, come on dude. The village isn’t even giving you firewood, like they can afford gold goblets for church services not everyone is even going to anyway. Figure out your priorities.

The nail in the coffin came on October 16, 1691 with the election of a new village council. Five men in particular who were sworn in that year were decidedly anti-Parris, and tipped the committee majority in that direction: Joseph Porter, Francis Nurse, Joseph Putnam, Daniel Andrew, and Joseph Hutchinson. We know that Parris likely saw these men as a threat, or at least worth keeping track of, as he wrote their names down in the margins of the church book. It seems that in pettiness, the Villagers had met their match. Also at this meeting, the majority of the village present voted to not collect Parris’s salary for the year. At this point, about 29% of his salary for the past two years remained unpaid.

[[MUSIC: Quirky]]

This was, to put it lightly, a sticky situation. Parris was quickly running out of money and other provisions, including the firewood needed to get his family through the winter that was fast approaching. He called several meetings with the male church members to help him appeal to the village committee throughout November. The church representatives presented their case to the council, only to be rebuffed and told to send a signed letter with their complaints. As the church reps prepared to file a suit against the village council, Parris’s pleas to the congregation became more desperate. All of this supposedly culminated in a village meeting on December 1st, which was called to discuss the legitimacy of Parris’ contract with the village and the legality of gifting him the parsonage.

I say “supposedly” because nobody seems to have written down what happened. Parris didn’t write anything for December 1st in the Village record book, though that may have been because of how the meeting supposedly went. The only record we have of the meeting is a reference in a document entered in a suit against Parris in 1697. According to that document, in a particularly heated portion of the meeting, Parris was asked to explain his understanding of the terms and conditions of his contract. It was at this point, over two years into his appointment, that Parris learned about the ambiguous terms in which his demands were recorded. So not only had he not been at the meeting where his contract was put on paper, but he had apparently not reviewed it since. And with the tact we’ve come to expect from the man of God thus far, Parris denounced the document, saying that he never agreed to those terms, that he would not agree to those terms, and called those who recorded those terms “knaves and cheaters”.

But like it or not, the Village and the Reverend were stuck with each other. Since Parris owned the parsonage, the Village could not outright fire him. The best they could do was to keep Parris cut off financially in the hopes that he would bow out as gracefully as possible. Sammy P, however, showed no signs of budging. And winter was closing in.

[[MUSIC: Melancholy]]

And so Samuel Parris was once again, quite literally, left out in the cold. He’s failing, again. And he doesn’t know why. He’ll never know why. Because, of course, it isn’t his fault. Nothing ever is. What it boils down to, when you look at his career and his writings, is that he is simply a bitter, paranoid man who thinks that the world is out to get him and just doesn't seem to realize that at every single downfall in his life, there is a common thread–Samuel Parris.

Who’s to say what Parris thought his next move was to be in early 1692? He was a stubborn man quickly running out of options. He had not been paid in a very long time. More importantly, he had not received the firewood necessary to comfortably survive the harsh New England winter. What else could possibly go wrong?

[[Outro music: “Our Names Engraved” by Blue Dot Sessions]]

Remarkable Providences was written, researched, and performed by me, Kate Devorak. It was produced by Dan Manning, and recorded by Chad Ellis. Our music is from Blue Dot Sessions. Find us on Twitter @RemarkablePod, and everywhere else @RemarkableProvidences. For transcripts and links to everything, visit us at whisperforge.org/remarkableprovidences

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Thanks for listening, and remember, the devil’s in the details.