The Witches: Salem, 1692

by Stacy Schiff

  ———. Worlds of Wonder, Days of Judgment: Popular Religious Belief in Early New England. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990.

  Hansen, Chadwick. Witchcraft at Salem. New York: George Braziller, 1969.

  Harris, Marguerite L., et al. John Hale: A Man Beset by Witches. Beverly, MA: Hale Family Association, 1992.

  Karlsen, Carol F. The Devil in the Shape of a Woman: Witchcraft in Colonial New England. New York: Norton, 1998.

  Koehler, Lyle. A Search for Power: The “Weaker Sex” in Seventeenth-Century New England. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1980.

  Konig, David Thomas. Law and Society in Puritan Massachusetts. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1981.

  Mather, Cotton. Diary of Cotton Mather. 2 vols. New York: Frederick Ungar, 1911.

  ———. Magnalia Christi Americana, or the Ecclesiastical History of New England. Hartford, CT: Silas Andrus, 1820.

  ———. Memorable Providences Relating to Witchcrafts and Possessions. EEBO Editions, n.d.

  ———. The Wonders of the Invisible World. Forgotten Books, 2012.

  Mather, Increase. An Essay for the Recording of Illustrious Providences. EEBO Editions, n.d.

  Norton, Mary Beth. In the Devil’s Snare: The Salem Witchcraft Crisis of 1692. New York: Vintage, 2003.

  Perley, Sidney. The History of Salem, Massachusetts, 1626–1716. 3 vols. Salem, MA, 1924.

  “Perspectives on Witchcraft: Rethinking the Seventeenth-Century New England Experience,” Essex Institute Historical Collections, vols. 128 and 129, October 1992 and January 1993.

  Phillips, James Duncan. Salem in the Seventeenth Century. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1933.

  Roach, Marilynne K. The Salem Witch Trials: A Day-by-Day Chronicle of a Community Under Siege. Lanham, MD: Taylor Trade, 2004.

  Rosenthal, Bernard. Salem Story: Reading the Witch Trials of 1692. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999.

  Rosenthal, Bernard, et al., eds. Records of the Salem Witch-Hunt. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009.

  Sewall, Samuel. The Diary of Samuel Sewall. 2 vols. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1973.

  Sibley, John Langdon. Biographical Sketches of Graduates of Harvard University in Cambridge, MA. Vols. 2 and 3. Cambridge, MA: C. W. Sever, 1873–1885.

  Silverman, Kenneth. The Life and Times of Cotton Mather. New York: Welcome Rain, 2002.

  Silverman, Kenneth, ed. Selected Letters of Cotton Mather. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1971.

  Stout, Harry S. The New England Soul: Preaching and Religious Culture in Colonial New England. New York: Oxford, 1986.

  Thomas, Keith. Religion and the Decline of Magic. London: Penguin, 1991.

  Thompson, Roger. The Witches of Salem. London: Folio Society, 1982.

  Trask, Richard B. “The Devil Hath Been Raised”: A Documentary History of the Salem Village Witchcraft Outbreak of March 1692. Danvers, MA: Yeoman, 1997.

  Upham, Charles W. Salem Witchcraft. 1867. Reprint, Mineola, NY: Dover, 2000.

  Weisman, Richard. Witchcraft, Magic, and Religion in Seventeenth-Century Massachusetts. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1984.

  Notes

  Three centuries of documentation can add up to as many pages of source notes. Volumes that have shaped the text as a whole or that I have consulted regularly appear in the selected bibliography; they are cited below by author’s last name and abbreviated title. Most accounts of 1692 have been printed and reprinted; I have tried to note them in their most readily accessible editions. The supporting seventeenth-century texts are available on Cornell University Library’s Witchcraft Collection website; most sermons are online; the bulk of the original Salem documentation can be found at the University of Virginia’s excellent Salem witch trials website. Principal sources—like the magisterial 2009 Records of the Salem Witch-Hunt, which for the first time offers up the extant record chronologically, lending the hunt its shape—are rendered as follows:

  B&N Boyer and Nissenbaum, eds., Salem-Village Witchcraft: A Documentary Record of Local Conflict in Colonial New England

  Burr Narratives of the New England Witchcraft Cases

  CM Diary Mather, Diary of Cotton Mather

  Magnalia Mather, Magnalia Christi Americana

  MP Mather, Memorable Providences

  WOW Mather, Wonders of the Invisible World

  IP Mather, Illustrious Providences

  JH John Hale: A Man Beset by Witches

  SPN Cooper and Minkema, eds., The Sermon Notebook of Samuel Parris

  RFQC The Records and Files of the Quarterly Courts of Essex County

  R Rosenthal et al., eds., Records of the Salem Witch-Hunt

  SS Diary Sewall, The Diary of Samuel Sewall

  Sibley Sibley’s Harvard Graduates

  EIHC Essex Institute Historical Collections

  Thomas Putnam—among the most prolific court reporters but by no means the most creative—alternately wrote “witch” and “wicth.” An apparition was an “apperishtion,” a “daughter” a “dafter,” “melancholy” was “malloncely.” For readability’s sake I have modernized spellings and taken occasional liberties with punctuation. All proper names conform to the spellings in Records of the Salem Witch-Hunt. John Hale, Cotton Mather, Increase Mather, and Samuel Parris are abbreviated as JH, CM, IM, and SP; NE is New England. Names of principal archives appear as follows:

  MHS Massachusetts Historical Society

  AAS American Antiquarian Society

  DAC Danvers Archival Center, Peabody Institute Library

  NEHGS New England Historic Genealogical Society

  PEM Phillips Library, Peabody Essex Museum

  PRO Public Records Office, Kew

  I: THE DISEASES OF ASTONISHMENT

  “We will declare”: Anton Chekhov, Letters on the Short Story, the Drama, and Other Literary Topics (New York: Benjamin Blom, 1964), 8.

  voodoo arrived later: The nineteenth-century historian was Charles W. Upham. For Tituba and the voodoo, Bernard Rosenthal, “Tituba,” OAH Magazine of History (July 2003), 48–50; Rosenthal, Salem Story, 10–31; Rosenthal, “Tituba’s Story,” New England Quarterly (June 1998): 190–203. On the educational eminence of Massachusetts: Lawrence A. Cremin, American Education: The Colonial Experience (New York: Harper and Row, 1970), 207. Gretchen Adams makes the fine point that the South supplied the witch-burning in the contentious 1850s: The Specter of Salem (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), 95–96.

  exact number: It is elusive, given mistaken identities and impartial records. Boyer and Nissenbaum, in Salem Possessed, put it at 141; Rosenthal, Salem Story, at 156; Emerson W. Baker, in A Storm of Witchcraft (New York: Oxford, 2015), at 169 or 172; Koehler, Search for Power, at 204. A contemporaneous account indicates that more than two hundred were accused. If so, far more documentation has been lost than we realize.

  a careful chronicler: Magnalia, 2: 411. It may have been a printer’s error.

  Might you be a witch: R, 392; the guilty innocent, R, 145.

  Nearly as many theories: Scholars have weighed in from every discipline. In lieu of a complete bibliography and among the best overviews of the immense literature: John Demos, The Enemy Within, 189–215; David D. Hall, “Witchcraft and the Literature of Interpretation,” New England Quarterly (June 1985): 253–81; John M. Murrin, “The Infernal Conspiracy of Indians and Grandmothers,” Reviews in American History (December 2003): 485–94; Trask, “The Devil Hath Been Raised,” x. For generational hostility, Demos, Entertaining Salem; for regional difference and ethnic hostility, Elinor Abbot, Our Company Increases Apace (Dallas: SIL International, 2007), and Richard Slotkin, Regeneration Through Violence (New York: Harper, 1996); for economic hostility, Boyer and Nissenbaum, Salem Possessed; for residual, imported regional hostility, Cedric B. Cowing, The Saving Remnant (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1995); for sexual hostility, Koehler, Search for Power; for an epidemic of encephalitis lethargica, Laurie Winn Carlson, A Fever
in Salem (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2000); for ergot, Linda R. Caporael, “Ergotism: The Satan Loosed in Salem?,” Science 192 (April 1976): 21–26; for ecclesiastical strains, Richard Latner, “‘Here Are No Newters’: Witchcraft and Religious Discord in Salem Village and Andover,” New England Quarterly (March 2006): 92–122. Benjamin C. Ray debunks the neat east-west split conceived by Boyer and Nissenbaum in Salem Possessed in his “The Geography of Witchcraft Accusations in 1692 Salem Village,” William and Mary Quarterly 65 (July 2008): 449–78. On taxes: Noel D. Johnson and Mark Koyama, “Taxes, Lawyers, and the Decline of Witch Trials in France,” MPRA, working paper no. 34266, October 2011; conspiracy, Enders A. Robinson, The Devil Discovered: Salem Witchcraft 1692 (Prospect Heights, IL: Waveland, 1991). Emily Oster makes a case that frantic witch-hunting coincides with a little ice age in “Witchcraft, Weather, and Economic Growth in Renaissance Europe,” Journal of Economic Perspectives 18 (Winter 2004): 215–28; the atmospheric conditions are from James Sullivan, The History of the District of Maine (Boston: Thomas and Andrews, 1795), 212. Ask today’s female reenactors at Plimoth Plantation what they consider the most punishing month of the year; without hesitation, they will say February.

  “There are departments”: Chadwick Hansen, “Andover Witchcraft and the Causes of the Salem Witchcraft Trials,” in The Occult in America, ed. Howard Kerr and Charles Crow (Urbana: University of Illinois, 1983), 53.

  “with more purity”: Nicholas Noyes, New-England’s Duty and Interest to Be an Habitation of Justice and Mountain of Holiness (Boston, 1698).

  “New English Israel”: CM, Small Offers Towards the Service of the Tabernacle in the Wilderness (Boston, 1689).

  what offended them: The “resistance to something” trope is from Henry Adams. See Stephen Innes, Creating the Commonwealth: The Economic Culture of Puritan New England (New York: W. W. Norton, 1995), 312.

  “neither drive a bargain”: Edward J. Ward, Boston in 1682 and 1699: A Trip to New England (Providence, RI: Club for Colonial Reprints, 1905), 54. Sewall and the courtship: SS Diary, 2: 966. New Hampshire’s lieutenant governor: John Usher Papers, Ms. N-2071, 102, MHS. Danforth cites Saint John the Baptist in Roger Thompson, Cambridge Cameos (Boston: New England Historic Genealogical Society, 2005), 146. The prisoner is from Perley, History of Salem, 3: 186; the killer cat from R, 436; the ax in the hand (testimony in both cases against Susannah Martin) from R, 276.

  church went flying: Ola Elizabeth Winslow, Meetinghouse Hill (New York: Macmillan, 1952), 54.

  very different dark: No one is better on the subject than A. Roger Ekirch, At Day’s Close: A History of Nighttime (London: Weidenfeld, 2005). I am grateful to John Demos for having called my attention to the book. Also for a sense of the wilderness among modern sources: Peter N. Carroll, Puritanism and the Wilderness (New York: Columbia University Press, 1969); William Cronon, Changes in the Land (New York: Hill and Wang, 1983); John R. Stilgoe, Common Landscape of America (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1982). The rabid hog: R, 359. Very often in the literature New Englanders refer to themselves as “ear-witnesses”; words—and sound—reigned supreme.

  agents had stolen them: CM Diary, 1: 171–73. Outwitting the devil, he preached without them from memory. It was September 1693; CM had journeyed to Salem in part to see to it “that the complete history of the late witchcrafts and possessions might not be lost.”

  rest of the Bible intact: John Hull, The Diaries of John Hull (Boston: John Wilson, 1857), 231.

  “diseases of astonishment”: CM in Burr, 101.

  “peevish and touchy”: John Bowle, ed., The Diary of John Evelyn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983), 2: 235. For a fine account of that “restrained hostility,” Michael Garibaldi Hall, Edward Randolph and the American Colonies, 1676–1703 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1960).

  venerable Salem minister: John Higginson to his son, August 31, 1692, Fam. Mss. 433, Higginson Family Papers, PEM; Norton, In the Devil’s Snare, 13, maintains that SP burned his notes.

  “a very wicked, spiteful manner”: R, 127. On the multiply authored testimonies and records, their transcriptions and lacunae, see especially Marion Gibson, Reading Witchcraft: Stories of Early English Witches (London: Routledge, 1999); Peter Grund’s superb “From Tongue to Text: The Transmission of the Salem Witchcraft Records,” American Speech 82 (Summer 2007): 119–50; Studia Neophilologica 84 (2012), in particular essays by Matti Peikola, Matti Rissanen, Leena Kahlas-Tarkka; Grund et al., “Editing the Salem Witchcraft Records: An Exploration of a Linguistic Treasury,” American Speech 79 (Summer 2004): 146–67; Grund, “The Anatomy of Correction,” Studia Neophilologica 79 (2007): 3–14.

  “I will tell”: R, 196–97.

  minister at odds: Samuel Willard, A Compleat Body of Divinity (Boston: B. Green, 1726), 627.

  II. THAT OLD DELUDER

  For the best portraits of the uncomfortable edge on which the Puritan lived: David D. Hall, “The Mental World of Samuel Sewall,” Proceedings of the MHS, vol. 92 (1980), 21–44; Edward Eggleston, The Transit of Civilization: From England to America in the Seventeenth Century (Boston: Beacon, 1959); Eve LaPlante, Salem Witch Judge: The Life and Repentance of Samuel Sewall (New York: Harper, 2007); Silverman, Life and Times of Cotton Mather; Richard P. Gildrie, The Profane, the Civil, and the Godly (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1994). For the dark, the cold, and the external climate: Carroll, Puritanism and the Wilderness; Ekirch, At Day’s Close. For the liturgical details, Charles E. Hambrick-Stowe, The Practice of Piety: Puritan Devotional Disciplines in Seventeenth-Century New England (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1982). No one has ransacked the historical record for the texture of day-to-day life better (if with less notation) than Alice Morse Earle in her various works. See also George Francis Dow, “Domestic Life in New England in the Seventeenth Century,” Topsfield Historical Collections 29 (1928); Jonathan L. Fairbanks, ed., New England Begins: The Seventeenth Century (Boston: Museum of Fine Arts, 1982); Roger Thompson, Sex in Middlesex: Popular Mores in a Massachusetts County, 1649–1699 (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1986); Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, Good Wives (New York: Vintage, 1991); and Winslow, Meetinghouse Hill. For the lay of the land, Katherine Alysia Grandjean, “Reckoning: The Communications Frontier in Early New England” (PhD diss., Harvard, 2008). The sound: Richard Cullen Rath, How Early America Sounded (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003). To Danvers town archivist Richard B. Trask, I owe countless other details.

  “But who can tell”: CM Diary, 1: 144.

  Skimming groves: The flight is reconstructed from Foster and Carrier’s testimony and that of their children and grandchildren: R, 467–75; Hale in Burr, 418; WOW, 158. The landscape derives from Cronon, Changes in the Land, 22–31; Joshua Scottow, A Narrative of the Planting of the Massachusetts Colony, Anno 1628 (Boston, 1694); Hull, Diaries, 225; interviews with Richard Trask, November 28, 2012, and February 8, 2015. Glanvill reprinted the Swedish crash from Anthony Horneck, An Account of What Happened in the Kingdom of Sweden (London: St. Lownds, 1682), 10. Charles MacKay, The Witch Mania (extracted from Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds [London, 1841]), 550, adds the tremendous height. On Andover and the Scots, Abbot, Our Company. The impassable path: RFQC, 9: 69.

  Sound echoed: For the eerie quiet, Ekirch, At Day’s Close. The beaver’s tail is from John Giles, Memoirs of Odd Adventures, Strange Deliverances, Etc. in the Captivity of John Giles (Cincinnati: Spiller and Gates, 1869), 40; “hideous noise with roaring”: John Josselyn, New-England’s Rarities (Boston: William Veazie, 1865), 48; screech of the crowd, SS Diary, 1: 509; flock of pigeons, CM in Silverman, Selected Letters, 34. Josselyn reported they were so thick they could obscure the sun. The freakish bellow: SS Diary, 1: 288; crack of timber, Gildrie, The Profane, xi; RFQC, 9: 580–84; tortoises propagating: Giles, Memoirs, 42.

  phantom Frenchmen: Magnalia, 2: 537–40. See also Marshall W. S. Swan, “The Bedevilment of Cape Ann,” EIHC 1
17 (July 1981): 153–77.

  glow-in-the-dark jellyfish: R, 244; moved the landmarks: R, 258–59; a saucer: R, 412; the broom: R, 409.

  lame Indian: SS Diary, 2: 750. The blinking went both ways. CM claimed that when Indians first saw a man on horseback, they took the “man and the horse to be one creature”; MP, 7.

  The Sewall incident: SS Diary, 1: 331. Baxter had long before noted that lightning more often struck churches than castles, an observation to which CM would refer in A Midnight Cry (Boston, 1692). He insisted on its preference for ministers’ homes in Magnalia, 2: 313.

  “Horrid sorcerers”: Magnalia, 2: 537. Four armed Indians: RFQC, 4: 230. House in ashes: Charles H. Lincoln, ed., Narratives of the Indian Wars, 1675–1699 (1913; repr., New York: Barnes and Noble, 1959), 83.

  “It is harder to find”: Magnalia, 2: 515.

  “Our men could see”: Daniel Gookin, cited in Carroll, Puritanism and the Wilderness, 207. Essex County suffered proportionately more casualties than the rest of the colony. “I believe no town in this province has suffered more by the war than Salem,” John Higginson Jr. wrote his brother in 1697; Higginson Family Papers, MHS Collections, 1838, 202. For King Philip’s War, see Jill Lepore’s superb The Name of War: King Philip’s War and the Origins of American Identity (New York: Vintage, 1999).

  devastating raids: See Emerson W. Baker and James Kences’s fine “Maine, Indian Land Speculation, and the Essex County Witchcraft Outbreak of 1692,” Maine History 40 (Fall 2001): 159–89. Casualties on the other side were yet more dreadful. By the best estimates, the Indian population of NE numbered around 100,000 in 1600. By the century’s end—with some 90,000 Englishmen in America—it had fallen to about 10,000.

  “The whole race”: John Dunton, John Dunton’s Letters from New England (Boston: Prince Society, 1867), 293.

  “I Stand Here”: RFQC, 5: 290.