by Gail Collins
If a colonial woman who wasn’t a Quaker wanted to have a public voice and survive the experience, her best bet was to go to the frontier, like Mary Starbuck the Nantucket preacher. But Anne Bradstreet, who lived on the coast and maintained her social standing, still managed to write what the poet Adrienne Rich has called “the first good poems in America.” Like her contemporary, Anne Hutchinson, Bradstreet was reared in England by a father who believed girls should be educated, and she came to the New World as part of the Puritan elite—both her father and her husband, Simon, served as governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. She was a busy housewife, mother of four sons and four daughters, but turned to writing as an outlet for her active mind and troubled soul. Her poems were circulated only among her friends and family until 1650, when her brother-in-law had them published in London under the title The Tenth Muse, lately sprung up in America…By a Gentlewoman in those parts. Anne celebrated with a wry, self-deprecatory poem that did not quite conceal her pride. Her earlier work was self-conscious, but later she developed the confidence to write more naturally and directly, about the wild New England countryside, her struggles to come to grips with her faith, about the death of infant grandchildren, and her happy marriage. (“If ever two were one than surely we /If ever man were loved by wife, then thee.”) She died an early colonial success story, a woman who made her mark not only through the children she bore but also through her art and intellect. But she always knew how skeptically the world would regard a female poet. “I am obnoxious to each carping tongue /Who says my hand a needle better fits,” she wrote, adding that if the poems proved pleasing, “it won’t advance /They’ll say it’s stol’n. or else it was by chance.”
“CHOPPED INTO THE HEAD
WITH A HATCHET AND STRIPP’D NAKED”
A better-known homegrown colonial celebrity was Hannah Dustan, a farmer’s wife in Haverhill, Massachusetts. In 1697, Indians attacked the town, burning about a half dozen homes and killing a number of citizens. Hannah’s husband and seven oldest children escaped safely, but forty-year-old Hannah, who had just given birth, was taken captive, along with her nurse, Mary Neff, and newborn baby. “E’er they had gone many Steps, they dash’d out the Brains of the Infant against a Tree; and several of the other Captives, as they began to Tire in their sad Journey…the Salvages would presently Bury their Hatchets in their Brains and leave their Carcasses on the Ground for Birds and Beasts to Feed upon,” recounted Cotton Mather, the famed Massachusetts preacher, who always had a sense for the finer detail.
Despite her weakened condition, Hannah managed to survive the hundred-mile march through the wilderness with her captors. She, Neff, and an English boy named Samuel Leonardson were given as prisoners to an Indian family. While the Indians were sleeping, the captives killed ten people, six of them children, cut off their scalps, and paddled off in a stolen canoe. They returned home to great acclaim, most of it heaped upon Hannah. Mather delivered a sermon in her honor. The General Court awarded her a generous bounty for the scalps—a reward she probably had in mind when she took time during her escape to slice off the tops of her captors’ heads.
Another era would have viewed Dustan’s conduct as unladylike, to say the least. (“Would that the bloody old hag had been drowned,” wrote Nathaniel Hawthorne in 1836.) But when it came to fighting Indians, colonial society was willing to drop its normal criteria for feminine behavior. The early, harmonious relationship between the Pilgrims and the Native Americans had deteriorated as the colonists became more numerous and more pushy, leading to King Philip’s War in 1675. More than half the towns in New England were attacked and a decade later, a new series of violent uprisings began. The frontier areas were particularly hard hit, and many of the residents there must have contemplated a retreat to safer and more populated areas. But the rest of the colonies needed the settlers to stay put and hold the perimeter against the enemy. That eagerness to make the frontier families feel empowered probably inspired colonial leaders to eulogize Hannah Dustan and other female Indian fighters. There are some vague reports about women learning to handle firearms, but they would not have found seventeenth-century guns user-friendly—they were heavy, unwieldy, and generally inaccurate. Instead, the colonists told stories about clever women who drove off Indians by throwing hot lye or burning coals on their attackers. Others were said to have tricked Indians by making a lot of noise and convincing them the settlement was defended by troops. Elizabeth Tozier of Salmon Falls dressed in men’s clothes and stood guard over the fields while the men worked. Later it was reported that she had beaten back Indian attackers by throwing boiling soap on them, and survived being captured three times.
In 1682, Mary Rowlandson, the wife of a Massachusetts minister, published her account of her ordeal during King Philip’s War, and it became a huge best-seller by the standards of the times. (In those days of small population and few books, a very popular volume sold perhaps 1,000 copies.) Although it’s unlikely Mrs. Rowlandson ever actually handled firearms, the cover of the book sensationally showed her shooting at her attackers like a colonial Annie Oakley. The settlers wanted assurance there was life after an Indian attack, and that’s what they got from Rowlandson’s happy ending—she and her children all eventually got home. But her story was also a ripping tale, and the minister’s wife didn’t scrimp on the colorful details—like the colonist who was “chopped into the Head with a Hatchet and stripp’d naked.” The author, who credited God’s plan for everything, saw part of her ordeal as a divine method of convincing her to stop smoking tobacco.
When Rowlandson was captive she was forced to work as a servant to Wetamo, the female sachem, or leader, of a group of Wampanoag Indians. Wetamo commanded about 300 warriors, but Rowlandson’s description of her is rather short on statecraft and long on clothing and cosmetics. Unsurprisingly, she also regarded Wetamo as proud and severe. Although in many of the eastern tribes the power of women was fading, as the whites encouraged male activities, like trapping and hunting, the Wampanoags were led by several female sachems. Wetamo was most famous, perhaps because she was sister-in-law to the Philip of King Philip’s War. But she had reason to dislike the English herself, since her husband had died mysteriously while in colonial custody. Her army fought bravely against the settlers, until the war came to its inevitable end and Wetamo was killed, her head displayed on a pole for the edification of the English. Another female sachem, Awashonks, managed to steer a safe diplomatic course between the suspicious colonists and the angry Indians in Philip’s army. The colonial historians regarded her as a dithering female trying to please both her warlike kinsmen and an English lover. But at a time when happy endings for Indians were in short supply, Awashonks managed to obtain one for her people.
SALEM
“BY MY OWN INNOCENCE
I KNOW YOU ARE IN THE WRONG WAY”
The American colonists would have rated such crises as Bacon’s Rebellion or King Philip’s War as much more significant than the Salem witch-hunts. But there’s something about the story of Salem that makes it a Rorschach test for our own vision of history. Some people look back on it as a story about repressed sexual hysteria. Some think it was all about the tensions between the settlers and the Indians. Others see slightly subliminated class warfare. Whatever happened, it was soaked in issues of gender. Women were the beginning and end of the Salem witch-hunt, the first accusers and the bulk of the accused. If seventeenth-century New England was a place full of women with personalities that were stronger than the society around them was prepared to accept, the witch craze can easily be interpreted as a story that began with teenage girls in crisis who stumbled on a very bad but effective way of trying to take control of their unhappy environment.
The trouble began during the long winter of 1691–92, with adolescents, worried about their future, experimenting with “little sorceries.” With the help of Tituba, a twenty-five-year-old slave from Barbados, a small circle of Salem village girls tried to determine whom they would marry by
dropping an egg white into water. Nothing was more critical for a New England woman than finding a suitable mate, and by the end of the seventeenth century, the options were becoming narrower. Prospective brides no longer enjoyed a seller’s market. The ratio of men to women was evening out, and as the land along the coast became scarcer, many of the young single males were striking out for the frontier, leaving a surplus of girls behind. The shape of the egg white in the water was supposed to tell Tituba’s audience what occupation their husbands would follow. But as it took form, the girls felt they saw the outline of a coffin. Good Puritans, they must have felt guilty already about dabbling in magic. The coffin probably made them feel they were looking into the face of their own doom.
Not long afterward, some of the girls who witnessed the experiment began to behave very peculiarly. Some of the descriptions of their condition sound as though they suffered the torments of the damned. One observer reported that the girls appeared to be “bitten and pinched by invisible agents. Their arms, necks and backs turned this way and that way, and returned back again, so as it was impossible for them to do so themselves, and beyond the power of any epileptic fits or natural disease to effect.” But others described what sounded like children acting out, “getting into holes and creeping under chairs and stools,” making “antic gestures” and “ridiculous speeches.”
The girls knew the signs of possession. Cotton Mather had published a description of the affliction that supposedly befell the children of John Goodwin, an upstanding Boston resident in 1688. Sometimes, Mather wrote, the children were deaf “sometimes dumb and sometimes blind and often all this at once…. They would make mostpiteous outcries, that they were cut with knives, and struck with blows that they could not bear…they would roar exceedingly.” Mather wasn’t a reliable reporter—at one point, the minister had the children flying around the room “like geese.” But the other Puritans believed him, and the case was known throughout the colonies.
Whether the Salem girls were suffering hysterical fits, or just playacting to cover up their psychic unease, they soon had the very unusual experience of being the center of attention. Adolescent girls were the least powerful people in a New England community. Their education was usually limited to learning enough to read the Bible. Many of them, even those from well-to-do families, were sent away from home to work as servants, to learn domestic skills and the proper spirit of obedience. (Six of the eight who would become the core of the witch-hunt accusers did not live with their own families.) But suddenly, important adults were trooping to their homes to see them and talk with them. Everything they said was taken very seriously.
These particular girls had unusually gloomy histories, even for Puritans. Some had survived Indian attacks in which other family members were slaughtered. The “victims” who became ill first were from two exceedingly unhappy families. Nine-year-old Betty Parris was the daughter of Samuel Parris, the Salem village minister. Her mother was an invalid, who probably left Betty unsupervised or in the care of Tituba, their slave. Parris, a failed businessman attempting to start a new career as a clergyman, had been involved in a long struggle to keep his position, fighting a faction of the local power structure that continually withheld his salary. He seems to have been a troubled and troubling personality, both grasping and paranoid. In the small, dark house, Betty was most likely exposed to her father’s grievances, and given a keen sense of who the family friends and enemies were in the fractious village. She probably followed her father’s lead in identifying his enemies with the forces of Satan. Abigail Williams, her eleven-year-old cousin, was an orphan who lived with the family.
The other earliest accuser was twelve-year-old Ann Putnam, the daughter of Thomas and Ann Putnam. The Putnams were one of the major families in the village, but for years their fortunes had been ebbing, while their rivals became wealthier and more powerful. Thomas and Ann had entered marriage confident that they would come into large inheritances from their respective parents. But in both cases, their stepmothers redirected the money to children of their own. Ann Sr. suffered not only from thwarted expectations, but also from poor health and the loss of several babies. Her sister Mary had died after a series of unsuccessful pregnancies, and Ann was plagued by dreams of Mary and the lost children. Ann Jr. became the leader of the girls when the finger-pointing began, and soon her mother joined in, too. Some students of the Salem saga believe that at some point along the way, the Putnams actually took control of the accusations and deliberately directed them toward their local enemies. Eventually eight members of the Putnam family wound up accusing forty-six different people of witchcraft.
Although the Puritan leaders always referred to the accusers as “the children,” by the time the executions began many of the early participants had dropped out, from guilt or exhaustion, and been replaced by older women with less innocent histories. (Betty Parris was sent away by her parents, and eventually her signs of possession stopped. Abigail Williams, her orphaned cousin, remained in Salem and continued to see witches.) And the girls did not begin accusing people spontaneously. They were pestered by their parents, and by neighbors who swarmed in to see the young women and their dramatic fits. In other towns, clergymen had kept a lid on witch hysteria by ignoring the accusers’ more outrageous claims. But in Salem, visiting ministers and Betty’s own father demanded that they name their persecutors. The girls eventually identified three local women—Tituba; Sarah Good, a homeless beggar; and Sarah Osborne, a sickly middle-aged woman who had been involved in a legal battle with the Putnams. Under normal circumstances, their arrest would have ended the saga. But the male authority figures in the colony continued to follow the girls’ lead, taking their most bizarre allegations at face value, and holding trials in which the alleged witches were prodded to confess, while the girls shrieked that they were being tortured. By September, 20 people had been executed as witches and over 150 others sent to jail, where four adults and one woman’s newborn infant died.
To the first Americans, witches were as real as wolves or Indians. They flew on brooms or stools to special meeting places, where they signed Satan’s book of souls and got their marching orders. Then they used their powers to bring down misfortune on their neighbors, killing cows, ruining crops, and causing healthy babies to suddenly sicken and die. Less than fifty years before the Salem crisis, several hundred people were executed in England for witchcraft, about 90 percent of them women. The definitive works on witchery by medieval Europeans all carefully explained that “more women than men are ministers of the devil” because of their intellectual and moral inferiority. But if most Americans believed in witches, only New Englanders seemed particularly interested in ferreting them out. There were virtually no witch trials in any colonies but Massachusetts and Connecticut. Even there, the trials were generally isolated events, involving one or two suspects. More people were charged and executed for witchcraft during the Salem crisis than over the rest of American history.
As in Europe, the typical American witch-suspect was a woman, frequently middle-aged with few or no children and a reputation as a difficult personality. But the rest of the profile had mutated in the new world. In the colonies, accused witches were not necessarily poor outsiders. Many of them, in fact, had either inherited or were likely to inherit property. A famous example was Ann Hibbens, a well-to-do Boston widow who was executed in 1656. Hibbens, the wife of a magistrate, had always been regarded as hard to deal with by some of her neighbors. The case that sealed her doom began when some carpenters came to her home and did some work that Hibbens regarded as poor in quality. Complaining she was overcharged, she took her grievance all the way to the governor without receiving satisfaction. Hibbens never backed down, although she was excommunicated, in part for serving as an “evil example” to “diverse other wives.” But she was protected by the position of her husband, who seemed to care for her even if he could not entirely control her. When he died, charges of witchcraft were raised for the first time, and Hibbens’s
fate was sealed. One minister claimed she was sent to the gallows “only for having more wit than her neighbors,” but to the Boston populace, she was yet another dangerous woman, a deadly combination of being different and powerful.
The first Salem women to be accused were more along the old stereotype of hapless outsiders. Sarah Good was a beggar who had been reared in more prosperous circumstances and showed her dissatisfaction with misfortune by cursing the people whom she petitioned for food and money. When she was brought to the Salem meetinghouse, her own husband testified that she was an awful wife and “an enemy to all good.” Both the accused Sarahs denied being witches. But Tituba attempted to protect herself by saying what her questioners wanted to hear—a tactic that ultimately saved her life but gave the Salem authorities the ammunition they needed to keep the hunt going. She said a tall man from Boston with white hair had both tempted and threatened her, promising to kill the Parris children and herself as well if she refused to serve him. The accusers quickly picked up on Tituba’s story. The slave described a creature like a cat, with two legs, wings, and a woman’s head. Abigail Williams, Minister Parris’s niece, announced that she had seen just such a being, and it had turned into Sarah Osborne.