Lately, I’ve been caught in a conversational time warp, repeating the same exchange again and again with colleagues in Colonial history. It always goes like this:
Random Early Americanist: “What are you working on now?”
Me (with some hesitation): “Salem witchcraft.”
Early Americanist (with jaw dropping and eyes widening): “But ... surely there’s nothing new to say.”
After that standard opening, conversations go in different directions, depending on the interests of the historian with whom I’m talking. But that such exchanges inevitably occur should not surprise me, because I, myself, hesitated for years before tackling the much-studied witchcraft episode in 1692 in Salem, Mass.
I have never before worked on a monograph on a historical subject about which so much has already appeared in print. My dissertation and my first two books dealt with topics (the Loyalist exiles in England during the American Revolution, women in the Revolution) that had received little attention from scholars since the 1930’s. My third monograph, Founding Mothers & Fathers: Gendered Power and the Forming of American Society, dealt with a subject about which a few historians had written (the 17th-century analogy between family and state), but in a very different way (ignoring gender).
Indeed, a study of Salem was such a major break from my usual scholarly pattern that I found myself intellectually paralyzed for over a year, as I tried to decide whether to plunge into research on the events of 1692. Yet at the same time, I was ineluctably drawn to the topic.
Not surprisingly, in my conversations with colleagues in early-American history, people repeatedly alluded to Carol F. Karlsen’s influential The Devil in the Shape of a Woman (1987). Reading that book (I originally saw it as an unpublished dissertation) first alerted me to the potential of a study of Salem witchcraft.
What had struck me forcibly was that, although Karlsen’s text stresses the similarities among women accused of witchcraft in Salem and those accused in earlier episodes elsewhere in New England, her convenient summary tables tell a different story. In the chapter “The Demographic Basis of Witchcraft,” for example, 7 out of 10 tables show that, regardless of sex, age, or marital status of the accused, the 1692 episode appears fascinatingly anomalous when set against a backdrop of a general study of those accused of being witches in the region over the course of the entire 17th century.
Another work of scholarship similarly led me to think seriously about confronting the 1692 crisis. Along with many other historians, I had once accepted Paul S. Boyer and Stephen Nissenbaum’s 1974 Salem Possessed: The Social Origins of Witchcraft -- a study of the social milieu surrounding the events of 1692 -- as the final word on the subject. After years of teaching the book, however, I had become progressively dissatisfied with its limited framework: its concentration on Salem Village to the exclusion of other sites that were important during the Salem crisis (especially Andover, the residence of the vast majority of people who confessed to being witches, and of a plurality of all those accused) and, most important, the book’s insistence that gender was irrelevant to its story.
Boyer and Nissenbaum’s schema focused exclusively on the men of Salem Village and their political and economic affairs, not on the concerns of the afflicted women and girls who claimed to have been hurt by witches. As a scholar of women’s history, I found it inconceivable that gender could have played absolutely no role in the development and outcome of the crisis.
Most compelling, though, was how Salem fit into my larger interests -- the study of the relationship of gender and politics in the Colonial period. Founding Mothers & Fathers had carried an examination of the topic through approximately 1670; over the 13-plus years I had worked on the book, I had begun to see it as the first of two volumes on the years before the American Revolution. I even noted in my final pages that I would be pursuing the topic further. But as I tell colleagues who express surprise that I am not now tackling another broad examination of gender and politics, if one is interested in that theme in America between 1670 and 1750, Salem is the 800-pound gorilla sitting there staring you in the face.
For me, the question was always how to deal with Salem, not whether to do so: Would I devote an entire volume to the subject, or handle it only in the context of a more general work?
About two years ago, I decided in favor of the former approach. Salem clearly deserved a book all to itself (and I was coming to realize that it would probably dominate a more broadly conceptualized research agenda anyway). Having spent more than a decade on a project that seemed endless, I also found enticing the relatively limited number of sources that I would have to read and analyze before I could start writing.
In the end, however, what broke through my intellectual paralysis was the recognition that all those other books and articles on Salem could be assets rather than liabilities: I could rely on the assiduous work of others for much background material -- and focus my energy on the aspects of the crisis I found most intriguing.
And so I embarked on a project that I invariably describe to my friends as “bewitching.” As the research has progressed, I have come to understand why some scholars become so enthralled by Salem that they never move on to other subjects. The broad outlines of the story are familiar. But in more ways than one, the devil is in the details.
The Salem witchcraft crisis began in mid-January 1692, when several young girls affiliated with prominent families in Salem Village began to suffer from fits, which they and their elders eventually attributed to witchcraft. It essentially ended the following November, when the last three suspects were accused. Legal action against the accused extended from February 29, 1692 (the first formal accusations) to May 1693 (the final trials). Those months witnessed about 180 documented accusations and, perhaps, uncounted others; legal action against at least 144 people (including 38 men), most of whom were jailed for long periods; 54 confessions of witchcraft; the hangings of 14 women and 5 men; the pressing to death of another man by heavy stones by order of the authorities; and the deaths in custody of three women, a man, and two infants from unknown causes.
Most of the examinations of the accused took place in Salem Village (now Danvers), but the trials occurred in Salem Town (present-day Salem); hence the term “Salem witchcraft” generally applies to events that involved participants from many towns in Essex County, Mass.
Throughout those months, the primary (although by no means only) accusers were a group of young women in Salem Village and Andover, ranging in age from 11 to 20. Accordingly, as in no other event in American history until well into the 19th century, women took center stage at Salem: They were the major instigators and victims of a remarkable public spectacle.
Most books about the crisis have shared two narrative strategies: They follow the legal chronology of Salem’s events, and they organize the story around the biographies of the accused. Thus, authors usually present the basic outline of the narrative in the order of the dates on which accused witches were examined by the Salem magistrates, or the dates of their subsequent trials, discussing all of the evidence compiled against a person in the context of a single court appearance. That approach conflates events that occurred over a period of months or even years, for many of the accused turn out to have been the “usual suspects,” people whose neighbors had considered them witches for decades. The strategy directs attention to the trials as trials, rather than to the witchcraft episode as a whole. Although offering a convenient means of organizing extraordinarily complex material, it also obscures the underlying dynamic of the evolving crisis, both because formal legal actions followed the events that precipitated them by varying time periods, and because events that took place at approximately the same time are not necessarily discussed together.
For example, during the last week of March, five girls claimed that they had been afflicted by witchcraft. All together, five people were accused -- but only one, Rebecca Nurse, was named by more than one of the girls. Organizing the story on the basis of the accused brings only the two charges against Rebecca Nurse together. Obscured are the facts that one of the girls had named two other women on one day, or that all of the charges were made within one week. Yet understanding the cascading events of 1692 requires that the accusations be considered as they happened -- that is, in conjunction with one another.
Moreover, the general focus on legal action omits much evidence relevant to understanding the situation. Many purported witches were examined but never tried; or they were accused, but either were never examined, or no records of any examinations have survived. Such people commonly receive short shrift in books on Salem witchcraft, which focus on the best-documented prosecutions. For instance, because so many Andover residents readily confessed to being witches, no testimony was collected against them, and they were not tried until late in the crisis -- a period for which surviving records are scarce. Yet the content of the Andover confessions reveals a great deal about the dynamics of the crisis: the gossip lying behind many accusations, the fears uppermost in people’s minds, and thoughts about who the witches were, what they did, and why they did it.
So, what strategies have I adopted as I confront Salem witchcraft? As a base line for analysis, I have created a comprehensive, day-by-day calendar of events. Only by so doing can I achieve one of my major goals: understanding how the residents of Essex County in 1692 experienced the unfolding crisis. I am looking not only at the dates of complaints, arrests, examinations, and trials, but also at the dates on which accusers reported having been afflicted by witchcraft, and at the dates when witnesses offered sworn depositions against witches.
Gossip pervaded small Colonial communities, and I have decided to assume that information about anything that happened spread significantly, having an impact on subsequent events. The surviving records bear that out. For instance, as others have discovered, the Rev. John Hale’s May 20 deposition against Goodwife Sarah Bishop soon became known in garbled form to the young accusers, one of whom transmuted its contents into a statement implicating a different woman.
In my chronology, the third week of April stands out. From the beginning of formal accusations in February through April 17, charges had been lodged against just 10 people, only two of whom had confessed. But on April 19, Abigail Hobbs confessed that the Devil had recruited her in Maine several years earlier. On April 20, another afflicted girl had a spectral vision, identifying the Rev. George Burroughs, a former Salem Village minister who had subsequently moved to Maine, as the leader of the witches. Burroughs was arrested and brought back to the village, where he was examined, and then tried, convicted, and hanged in August.
Many scholars have paid little attention to Burroughs, and even those who recognize his importance have tended to ignore the significance of the date when he was first named as a witch, because that occurred two and a half weeks before his examination and three months before his trial. But it was the accusation against him that turned what had been a large (though not wholly unprecedented) witch hunt into the extraordinary event we call “Salem,” with the number and pace of accusations increasing rapidly afterwards.
Furthermore, it was in mid-April that many accusers began to fantasize about witches’"sabbats” (previously unheard of in Colonial America, although they were known in Europe); the rites were said to have been presided over by Burroughs, who allegedly baptized his devotees and administered the Devil’s sacraments to them. Burroughs, a resident of Maine both before and after his sojourn in Salem Village, was also accused of aiding the Indians (identified as the Devil’s minions) in their attacks on English settlements during King William’s War, which had begun on the northeastern frontier in 1688 as the French and their Indian allies tried to oust English settlers from the region.
The conflict, fought primarily in Maine, New Hampshire, and northern New York, had been proceeding badly for the English colonists ever since the devastating failure of their 1690 attack on Quebec and Montreal. Indeed, in January 1692 -- at about the same time that the afflicted girls first began having fits -- Indian allies of the French destroyed the town of Wells, Me., less than 80 miles from Salem. Despite the geographical and chronological conjunction of events, few historians have linked the Salem crisis and King William’s War in more than a cursory way.
Most scholars also have focused their attention on those accused of witchcraft in Salem; only a few have devoted many pages to the accusers. Boyer and Nissenbaum discuss the girls who were linked to the Putnam family of Salem Village, but even those authors treat the girls not as individuals but as mouthpieces for the concerns of adult Putnam men. The key accusers, however, constitute an especially intriguing group, because young women were generally among the most voiceless and powerless residents of 17th-century America.
As I began to think more about the girls, footnotes in Carol Karlsen’s book alerted me to the fact that an appreciable percentage of them were orphans from Maine, who were employed in Salem as domestic servants. Their parents had been killed by Indian attacks in the war. Some of their families had been burned out twice -- the first time during King Philip’s War, in 1675-76, when many of the girls had been infants or toddlers. That such experiences were traumatic is especially apparent in Cotton Mather’s account of the affliction of Mercy Short, an orphaned servant and former Indian captive. She told Mather that, in her visions, the Devil was “of a tawney, or an Indian colour,” and that he and his specters afflicted her with “hideous assaults.” Her description of the spectral tortures she experienced resembled those commonly inflicted at the time by Indians on their prisoners. Such evidence has tended to be played down in prior works on Salem because Short never testified at any trial.
Nor have scholars paid much attention to a small but extremely significant set of accused witches: a handful of prominent merchants and military men, some of them from Boston. Feminist scholars have overlooked that group because the accused were men (feminists have primarily interested themselves in accused women), while male scholars, many of them legal historians, have overlooked the men because not one of them was ever tried. Most managed to escape from custody; some fled to safety in Rhode Island or New York. What all of those men -- Captain John Alden the most prominent among them -- had in common was that they had been active in mercantile and military activity on the Maine frontier.
Thus, all roads seemed to lead me to Maine, and to the war there, a much more palpable presence in the lives of Essex County residents in 1692 than most historians have recognized.
Previous witchcraft episodes in New England had typically involved just one or two accusations -- never more than a dozen -- at one time. Nearly all of the individuals accused in such episodes can be categorized as the “usual suspects” and their relatives. Thus, what has to be explained about the 1692 crisis is not only the extraordinary number of accusations, but also the identity of many of the accused, who had not previously been characterized as witches by neighborhood gossip. The frontier connections of both accusers and some (though admittedly not all) of the accused provide much of that explanation.
Furthermore, King William’s War -- and its devastating impact on the collective mindset of northeastern New England -- goes a long way toward explaining why judges and juries were willing to listen to people who, under usual circumstances in the 17th century, would have been silenced by their gender, status, and age: the daughters and domestic servants who were among the most active accusers. When such girls and young women offered a spectral explanation for the myriad troubles besetting New England, they found a ready audience for their charges. That the Devil was assisting the Indians seemed to provide the key to why the English colonists had made so little progress against their enemies.
In 1692, the war was being waged very near the Salem hinterlands, as one northeastern frontier town after another collapsed under enemy assault. (One attack struck just 20 miles from Salem, while the trials were in progress.) The answer to the central question -- Why did events in 1692 spiral out of control so quickly in mid-April? -- can be found in the war being fought to the west, north, and east of Salem. Terrified by the threat of Indian attacks, and focusing their fears on prominent men with frontier ties as well as on local women commonly regarded as witches, the afflicted girls for months turned the world of northeastern New England upside down, wielding unprecedented political and judicial power and causing the deaths of about two dozen people.
Therefore, only a broad conceptualization, one that views the Salem witchcraft crisis as a regionwide phenomenon -- involving accusers and accused, women and men, Anglo-American settlers and Indians -- can fully reveal the dimensions of gender and race in this key incident in America’s past. In my book, I plan to elaborate on that conclusion.
Mary Beth Norton is a professor of history at Cornell University. Her book, tentatively titled In the Devil’s Snare, is under contract to Alfred A. Knopf.
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