Colonial America

by Richard Middleton, Anne Lombard

  In these circumstances the normal judicial processes were completely overturned, as was demonstrated in the case of Rebecca Nurse. Although she was initially acquitted, her accusers set up such a clamor that the magistrates ordered the jury to reconsider their verdict, which they dutifully did. Given the prevailing mood, many of those accused preferred to confess, since a confession normally entitled a person to leniency. Unfortunately, those like Tituba who took this course had to name their accomplices in order to be convincing, so that even children denounced their parents in the general hue and cry.

  Figure 17 The Salem witch trial (artist's reconstruction). Library of Congress, Washington, DC.

  Until May 1692 the charges were confined to the vicinity of Salem village and town. In June, however, accusations began to be made at Andover, Haverhill, Topsfield, and Gloucester. By October over 140 people had been indicted, of whom 50 had confessed, 26 had been convicted, and 20 executed, 19 of them by hanging. The exception among those executed was Giles Corey, whose wife had already been condemned because she had protested her innocence, the presumption being that she would not give up the devil. Corey refused to implicate himself or his wife any further by pleading before the court, since a confession would probably have led to the forfeiture of all his lands. His ploy did him no good; he was ordered to be crushed under a pile of stones. Many prominent persons now went into hiding or fled to neighboring provinces.

  Document 14

  Recantation of the women of Andover, 1692, reprinted in Thomas Hutchinson, The History of the Colony and Province of Massachusetts-Bay, edited by Lawrence Shaw Mayo (Cambridge, Mass., 1936), Vol. 2, 31–2

  The following document summarizes the testimony of several women who confessed to witchcraft and then recanted. Bear in mind that in this society women were thought to be more likely to sin than men. Questions to consider: What does this testimony reveal about why people might confess falsely to a crime they had not in fact committed? In this society, might pressure to make a false confession be especially heavy for women?

  [When] … at Mr Parris's house, several young persons, being seemingly afflicted, did accuse several persons for afflicting them … we [were] informed that if a person was sick, the afflicted person could tell what or who was the cause of that sickness. Joseph Ballard of Andover, his wife being sick at the same time, he, either from himself or by the advice of others, fetched two of the persons, called the afflicted persons, from Salem Village to Andover, which was the beginning of that dreadful calamity that befell us in Andover … After [the Reverend] Mr Barnard had been at prayer, we were blindfolded, and our hands were laid upon the afflicted persons, they being in their fits and falling into their fits at our coming into their presence, as they said; and some led us and laid our hands upon them, and then they said they were well, and that we were guilty of afflicting them. Whereupon, we were all seized, as prisoners, by a warrant from the Justice of the Peace and forthwith carried to Salem. And, by reason of that sudden surprizal, we knowing ourselves altogether innocent of that crime, we were all exceedingly astonished and amazed, and consternated and affrighted even out of our reason; and our nearest and dearest relations, seeing us in that dreadful condition and knowing our great danger, apprehended there was no other way to save our lives, as the case was then circumstanced, but by our confessing … [I]ndeed that confession, that it is said we made, was no other than what was suggested to us by some gentlemen, they telling us that we were witches, and they knew it, and we knew it, which made us think that it was so; and our understandings, our reason, our faculties, almost gone, as we were not capable of judging of our condition; as also the hard measures they used with us rendered us incapable of making our defence, but said anything and everything which they desired, and most of what we said was but, in effect, a consenting to what they said. Some time after, when we were better composed, they telling us what we had confessed, we did profess that we were innocent and ignorant of such things; and we hearing that Samuel Wardwell had renounced his confession, and quickly after condemned and executed, some of us were told we were going after Wardwell.

  Confession of Sarah Carrier, aged seven, August 11, 1692, reprinted in Thomas Hutchinson, The History of the Colony and Province of Massachusetts-Bay, edited by Lawrence Shaw Mayo (Cambridge, Mass., 1936), Vol. 2, 34

  The following is a portion of the examination of Sarah Carrier, whose mother had already been condemned to death. Questions to consider: Would we consider this testimony to be reliable evidence of the truth? Why, or why not?

  It was asked Sarah Carrier by the Magistrates or Justices …: How long hast thou been a witch. Answer: Ever since I was six years old. Question: How old are you now? Answer: Near eight years old, brother Richard says, I shall be eight years old in November next. Question: Who made you a witch? Answer: My mother, she made me set my hand to a book [of the devil]. Question: How did you set your hand to it? Answer: I touched it with my fingers and the book was red, the paper of it was white … Being asked who was there beside, she answered her Aunt Toothaker and her cousin. Being asked when it was, she said, when she was baptized. Question: What did they promise to give you? Answer: A black dog. Question: Did the dog ever come to you? Answer: No. Question: But you said you saw a cat once. What did that say to you? Answer: It said it would tear me in pieces if I would not set my hand to the book. She said her mother baptized her, and the devil or black man was not there, as she saw, and mother said when she baptized her, thou art mine for ever and ever and amen. Question: How did you afflict folks? Answer: I pinched them … Being asked whether she went in her body or her spirit, she said in her spirit. And she said her mother carried her thither to afflict. Question: How did your mother carry you when she was in prison? Answer: She came like a black cat. Question: How did you know that it was your mother? Answer: The cat told me so that she was my mother.

  By this time ministers like Increase and Cotton Mather were becoming uneasy at the court's excessive reliance on spectral evidence. They were also alarmed at the contradiction of sparing confessing witches while executing those who asserted their innocence. Equally disturbing was the correlation between confessions and new accusations: the more people who confessed, the greater the number of accused. Indeed, the net was being cast so wide that even members of the civil and clerical establishment were being mentioned. Among those incriminated were the wives of Governor Phips, the Reverend John Hale, Parson Samuel Willard, and Dudley Bradstreet, a leading magistrate in Andover, all of whom had voiced their opposition to further prosecutions. Although the courts refused to take these latter charges seriously, their refusal to do so further undermined the legitimacy of their proceeding against others. At this point the credibility of the accusers themselves finally came into question, especially when early in October Increase Mather delivered a sermon suggesting that it was better that 10 suspects went free than that one innocent person was hanged. Even Parris, who had been most zealous in pursuit of those who had afflicted his children, began to recoil. A week later the governor, Sir William Phips, ordered the special court of oyer and terminer to be dissolved. By early 1693 the Superior Court of Judicature, which had replaced the previous tribunal, refused to hear further charges based solely on spectral evidence, in an implicit acknowledgment that wrong had been done. Several of the accused, however, remained in jail, unable to pay their jailers' fees. The first public apology came only in 1697 from Samuel Sewall, one of the judges, but not until 1711 was compensation paid to the surviving victims whose lives and those of their families had been ruined. Even then most people preferred to believe that the devil was to blame, even if innocent blood had been shed. For this reason no action was taken against either the accusers or the prosecuting justices. Most of the accusers drifted into obscurity, but the magistrates, like William Stoughton, the lieutenant governor and presiding judge, remained in high office.

  Though this extraordinary episode had many complex causes, historians have often argued that its most basic source w
as the stresses of the times. Ministers had spent decades preaching that God was angry with the colonists for their backsliding and warning that the colonists must guard vigilantly against Satan's assaults. Every crisis from King Philip's War to the loss of the charter had been presented as a chastisement from God. War then had broken out. All of these events helped to create an atmosphere of panic among ordinary people. The idea that Satan was causing their troubles, assisted by people within their midst, was entirely plausible. Massachusetts leaders, in turn, seem to have taken the accusations seriously because they too feared that Satan was trying to destroy their holy experiment.4 As Cotton Mather argued, “Where will the Devil show the most malice but where he is hated … most?”

  The dynamics of the relationship between ordinary people and Puritan leaders encouraged the process to spiral out of control. The clergy encouraged the accusers. Magistrates then allowed the accusations to multiply by permitting those with spectral visions to behave as they liked. The Putnam family, for example, intervened in support of witnesses and made statements about the defendants in blatant disregard of all due process.5 As the accusers were encouraged to describe their nightmarish fears and fantasies, the accusations grew in scope. Among the accusers were several young women who had fled their villages in Maine after Indian attacks in which their families' homes had been destroyed and family members killed. As time went on, these young women and others accused not only the kinds of vulnerable women ordinarily suspected of witchcraft, but also prominent political leaders, clergymen, and merchants, many of whom had ties to Maine. These later accusations are the most puzzling, until we remember that these prominent people were the kinds of people whom ordinary men and women expected to protect them from the devastation of war. The terrible violence on the frontier had to be explained, and the notion that powerful men had conspired with the Abenakis, the French, and Satan to attack the people provided a plausible explanation.

  Dozens of studies have explored the many complex dimensions of the Salem outbreak. Some historians have suggested that the afflicted children, brought up in a repressive manner, used the trials to attract attention and turn the tables on their parents. Others have argued that the initial accusations came from young girls who were approaching puberty, a time when psychological and physical stresses are acute. It was easy for them to become hysterical, making wild accusations to disarm their parents' anger and avoid blame for possible misdeeds. These hypotheses present the accusations as essentially fraudulent.6

  Other historians posit that the girls really believed they were bewitched, and (encouraged by adults) directed the blame towards individuals whom they feared or resented. Religious divisions may have contributed to such resentments. Parris was a stern opponent of the Half-Way Covenant and used this to exclude members of his congregation from taking communion. George Burroughs was distrusted in part because he appeared to have Baptist leanings. Finally, the Proctor and Nurse families had relatives who belonged to the Quakers, still an object of suspicion in the minds of many country people.

  Many of those initially accused were vulnerable women. Some historians have argued they became suspects because of their age, misfortune, or refusal to conform to social norms. For example, Good had a reputation for being a quarrelsome beggar, while Bridget Bishop, the first to be executed, had been accused of witchcraft a decade earlier. But such an interpretation does not explain the inclusion of persons like Elizabeth Carey, the wife of a wealthy Charlestown merchant, and Martha Corey, who were neither old, poor, widowed, nor social outcasts, though one common factor seems to have been that most of the women were beyond their childbearing years. Women beyond the menopause were thought to resent those who could still have children, which made them vulnerable to satanic influences. But that does not explain the inclusion of Elizabeth Proctor, who was pregnant at the time of her indictment.

  A more comprehensive interpretation is that the witchcraft accusations reflected patterns of gender repression and gendered power. Virtually all of the accusers were young, unmarried girls, who were among the least powerful members of their patriarchal society. Under ordinary circumstances young girls had little control over their lives, being governed by their fathers or their masters. Some of these girls would surely have resented their lack of power. Possession gave them a voice, made them momentarily important to their communities, and allowed them to express their resentments without being punished. In this interpretation, possession provided a temporary release from socially imposed repression.

  Women's lack of power also helps to explain why it was mostly women who were accused. This was a society whose members believed property should be controlled by men, and whose male members often felt resentful towards women who owned property in their own right, as a few did. Historian Carol Karlsen has found that a disproportionate number of those accused of witchcraft in Salem were women who owned or stood to inherit property, either as childless widows or as daughters in families without sons. Male witnesses feeling covert hostility towards such women may have encouraged charges of witchcraft against these women, while the women had little power to defend themselves. Ironically, the accusers were often aided by the accused women themselves, who frequently confessed. Like everyone else, the accused women subscribed to the view that women were the morally weaker sex, since it was Eve who had succumbed to the temptations of the serpent and caused the Fall. Perhaps they too were in some way to blame for their plight.7

  A different line of inquiry has suggested that the trials originated in the tensions between Salem town and Salem village. There is evidence to suggest the town was modern, commercial, and prosperous, while the village, especially its western half, was largely agrarian, steeped in more medieval and communitarian values. Tax lists have been interpreted to show that the accusers came from a part of Salem village where most inhabitants were subsistence farmers while most of those initially accused lived close to the town, where the greatest wealth lay. This hypothesis may explain why John Proctor was among the accused, for he ran a thriving tavern for travelers on the main road running north from Boston to the east of the village. The same entrepreneurial activity was also true of Israel Porter and his family, who also had considerable wealth, not only in land but also in milling enterprises. Recent historical analysis has challenged the evidence for some of these conclusions, but historians concur that economic tensions played some part in shaping events.8

  Certainly Salem had a long history of contention. Roger Williams had been one of its first pastors. Notable disputes had included a quarrel with George Burroughs over his salary as minister of Salem village before he left for Maine in 1683. Parris, the next minister, had been involved in a similar dispute. Among his supporters were the Putnam family, who favored a tax to fund the minister's stipend. Opposed to this faction were the Porters, Proctors, and others who were subsequently victimized. One of the factors behind the salary dispute was that many living on the eastern side of the village disputed the need for a separate church at all, since it was convenient for them to worship in Salem town. They were also angry that the village parsonage had been surreptitiously given to Parris, rather than leased, as required under the original bequest granting the land. They accordingly used their influence in Salem to block the demands for the tax to fund Parris's salary. In response, the Putnam group decided to seek town status for the village so that they could have a fully covenanted church and run their affairs without interference from Salem. However, in October 1691 they were thwarted once more when the Porter group gained control of the village committee. Within six months the first charges of witchcraft were being made, fanned by Parris's sermons about the dangers facing the community and the need to destroy the ungodly.

  These facts suggest that the trials may have been partly the result of personal grudges. In the past, charges of witchcraft had sometimes been brought by those who had a grievance against an individual. The Putnam family apparently had designs on some woods owned by the Nurse family, while several
of those accused in neighboring Topsfield had pursued litigation against the Putnams over land. Vengeance might also explain the spread of witchcraft charges to other towns, as former neighbors caught up with their longtime adversaries. Lastly, vengeance might account for the charges made by servants against their master. John Proctor and George Jacobs both became suspect when Mary Warren and Sarah Churchill accused them of witchcraft, following unsympathetic treatment at their hands. George Burroughs was another person to fall foul of a former servant, Mercy Lewis.

  All of these various explanations provide insight into the kinds of resentments and social tensions that contributed to witchcraft accusations in Salem and elsewhere. They do not, however, explain why a small number of accusations in Salem Village grew into an epidemic that convulsed the entire colony. It seems clear that an outbreak this large would not have occurred without the perception among the colony's Puritan leaders that their society was in crisis. Massachusetts leaders not only believed in but in some cases were demonstrably anxious about the presence of witches, which they feared might be partly responsible for God's seeming abandonment of their colony. Their fears were exacerbated by previously published accounts of two witch trials in England, while the eminent Massachusetts minister Cotton Mather had written an essay on the subject in 1689. From the beginning the Puritans had been obsessed about preserving the purity of their commonwealth. By the 1690s the Puritans had developed something like a siege mentality with their constant warnings that the Satan was trying to destroy their godly experiment. The war, and the Indian attacks that it provoked, seemed to confirm their fears that God had forsaken them. Certainly many ministers were disposed to see the Salem trials as justification for their jeremiads. In such a climate the subsequent excesses become understandable.