The Torturer's Dilemma: Analyzing the Logic of Torture for Information

possibility would be to question the wisdom of the judges themselves. A case in point is Cotton
Mather: a supporter of the trials, he was nonetheless concerned by the use of spectral testimony which
might allow the Devil to deceive in order to bring innocent blood onto the hands of the authorities. In
his letter to John Foster (a member of the Governor's council), Mather argued: “I am suspicious that the
Devil may at some time or other serve us a trick by his constancy for a long while in one way of
dealing. We may find the Devil using one constant course in nineteen several actions, and yet he be too
hard for us at last, if we thence make a rule to form an infallible judgment of a twentieth. It is our
singular happiness that we are blessed with judges who are aware of this danger.” (Hansen, p. 142)
Whatever might be our judgment of Boston's elites, we cannot argue that they were unconcerned with
the possibility of false accusations.
Once the trials were underway, another perverse incentive (intimately related) was to arise. If
the trials were going off the rails, then the judges would all have been guilty of the murder of innocent
people, and of helping the Devil to assault the community they were trying to protect. And if this were
so, then the elites would be de facto incapable of leadership – their judgment called into question, and
their souls imperiled. While chief judge and Lt. Governor William Stoughton would go to his grave
believing that those executed had been guilty as charged, other judges began to lose faith in the
proceedings as more and more confessors began to recant, including N. Saltonstall and S. Sewall. Even
Mather himself, who had been keenly aware of the dangerous undercurrent to the proceedings,
nonetheless refused to believe that the crisis was imaginary: something had to have been going on,
something diabolical, and even the end of the trials and the public proclamation of the innocence of the
accused was not enough to deter him from his belief that so many good and cautious men could have
been so disastrously wrong. Without a counter-narrative that allowed the judges to reinterpret the
evidence without implicating them for their fatal gullibility, the elites in charge of the trials could not
extricate themselves from the proceedings very easily. As noted above, those who did so (Bradstreet,
Saltonstall) soon found themselves targeted by the afflicted. 61 For the elites to recognize that the
afflicted were lying would mean to have been guilty of falling victims to the machinations of
prepubescent girls.
This counter-narrative would not arrive until October with Increase Mather's Cases of
61 Saltonstall had resigned from the court around the time that the first condemned – Bridget Bishop – was executed. “As
the months passed, he would remain “very dissatisfied with the proceedings.” The afflicted, moreover, would soon
report seeing his specter.” (Roach, p. 166)
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