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What I’m Reading Now 20

Posted June 28, 2010 by Patrick Young, Esq.

What I’m Reading Now: American Passage: The History of Ellis Island by Vincent J. Cannato
What I Just Finished Reading: In the Devil’s Snare: The Salem Witchcraft Crisis of 1692 by Mary Beth Norton published by Knopf (2002).

We all read The Crucible when we were kids. The teachers assigned it as a parable about the dangers of the McCarthy witch hunts, but we were into the scary black magic and, at my all-boy Catholic school, into the dangerous potential of teenage girls.

As a man, I read Salem Possessed, now considered a classic application of statistical analysis to seemingly inexplicable occurrences.

Since then I have walked the streets of Danvers where the earliest witchcraft accusations took place and visited the disgustingly touristy Salem wondering if someday, two hundred years from now, a torture theme park will be erected at the sites of the old Soviet Gulags.

We all know that a group of girls began to claim they were being afflicted by the supernatural in Salem Village, the present Danvers, in 1692. The local Puritan minister Samuel Parris, not sure of what was going on, called in a man of science, the local doctor, who announced that the devil had come to Massachusetts. So science informed religion that witchcraft was afoot.

Legal action was initiated against 144 people, 38 of whom were men. Even more people were accused of consorting with Satan but not indicted. 54 gave detailed confessions of their work for Satan, of their flights through the air on poles, and of the afflictions they had caused their victims.

Fourteen women and five men were executed for being witches. Giles Corey was pressed to death when he refused to stand trial for witchcraft. Three women, a man, and several infants died in custody. Horrible suffering in a few villages with combined populations smaller than my own modern village of Westbury.

The question for the last three hundred years has been “Why”?

The first modern treatment was a small book called “Salem Possessed” which applied statistical methods to identify the fracturing of the Salem Village community long before the witchcraft trials. Since then, most other works on Salem have either supported or countered that book’s thesis. Norton’s book is a departure.

Mary Beth Norton sees the witchcraft accusations as growing out of the war being waged by the Maine Indians against New England. Maine then was part of Massachusetts. French forces constantly challenged the sparsely populated region and Indians along the coast successfully drove the English out of much of the area. Widespread emotional trauma among the refugees fleeing to places like Salem is well-documented.

Norton found that many of those making accusations of witchcraft were connected to the Maine refugees. They had often lost family members in Indian raids and had seen colonial leaders fail in their duty to protect the frontier. Norton says that “the witchcraft crisis of 1692 can be comprehended only in the context of nearly two decades of conflict between the English settlers and the New England Indians.”

In 1692, Salem Village, modern Danvers, was seething with contention. The Village was separating itself from the seaport of Salem Town. The local Puritan church was sharply divided. Out of 200 adults in Salem Village, only 26 were considered virtuous enough to be admitted to church membership. The non-members were required by law to attend Sunday services and financially support the minister, but were told to leave church when the time came for communion since they were considered too sinful to partake.

The church’s pastor, Rev. Samuel Parris, stressed the superiority of the church members over other Salem Village residents. Offended non-members were slow to give their legally-required support to the church.

When girls in the Parris household began to exhibit strange behaviors, the minister went to the local medical doctor for a diagnosis. The doctor concluded that witchcraft was at work. The man of science told the minister of religion that this was a case of Satan’s work.

The “afflicted girls” accused people they knew of being witches and legal hearings were quickly organized. The first hearing set a pattern:

1. The judges assumed the guilt of the accused.
2. The accused seemed uncertain of how to respond to charges that their spirits were leaving their bodies and afflicting the girls.
3. When the afflicted girls were in court they would claim that the spirits of the accused were afflicting them during the hearing.
4. The crowds in the court would yell out unsworn statements that were treated by the judges as though they were evidence.
5. Relatives of the accused often expressed doubts about their innocence.

Many of the accused admitted to being witches and implicated others as witches. The modern phrase “witch hunt” refers to accusers frightening the accused into falsely admitting guilt and implicating other innocent people.

Was there witchcraft afoot in Salem in 1692? We know that some of the accusers used magic as a countermeasure to witchcraft. And there were, of course all of those confessed witches.

What about the afflicted girls? Some were definitely lying. Others might have believed their own accusations. Norton notes that girls and teenage women would ordinarily have been at the bottom of the social scale. Many of the afflicted girls were preteens, with almost no say in their families. When they were afflicted, they became celebrities, with important officials attending them.

Many of the afflicted girls described Satan as an Indian. Norton says that the Puritans believed that America had been the Devil’s country before the English came to redeem it for God. In 1692, they believed that Satan was attacking them through the Indians along the frontier, through the Catholic French, and through witches in their own community. It was all one war against evil.

Witches could come from all parts of society. While most were the classic old ladies living on the margins of communities, some were respected men and women. Dorcas Good, was a five year old girl. John Proctor was a sixty year old man with a tavern and a prosperous farm.

Two months into the accusations, the former Salem Village minister George Burroughs was named by the girls as the king of the witches. He was in Maine at the time of the accusation, and Norton said that he was the primary link between Salem and Maine, the witches and the Indians.

Poor Burroughs, who would be executed, could not believe that his former congregants thought he could control witches from hundreds of miles away from Salem.

After Burroughs was named, new accusations flooded in. Anyone who was “soft” on the Indians became suspect. People near Salem “sought avidly to identify the traitors in their midst.”

Next, people who criticized the trials or the accusers were denounced as witches.

Many of those accused of witchcraft were convicted on “spectral evidence”. A spirit or spectre would appear to an afflicted girl and tell her that the spectre was a witch and identify other witches in the community.

It did not occur to the judges that the real people whom the spectres represented knew that this evidence could send them to the gallows. So why would they send their spectres out to make such confessions to the girls?

Even when juries doubted the girls, they were pressed to punish the witches. The respected Rebecca Nurse was found not guilty by her jury, but the judges sent the jury back to reconsider her guilt. When Nurse was about to be executed, Reverend Noyes urged her to confess. She said “I am no more a witch than you are a wizard and if you take away my life, God will give you blood to drink.”

It was not until the fifth month of the crisis that serious opposition to the accusers developed. A local military leader drew up a memo arguing against the justice of the trials. He questioned the “doubtfulness and unsafety of admitting spectre testimony against the life of any”. He warned that the girls’ accusations were unreliable because they could be faked by the girls, or they might be used by the Devil to trap innocents. He also said that the girls might themselves be in league with the Devil. Finally he reminded the court that its most “solemn consideration” was the protection of the lives of the innocent and that spectral evidence was so unreliable that it was better to “let a guilty person live” than to accept it in court.

The memo’s author also asked why the court accepted the girls claim that the Devil came to them and told them who his witches were. If the Devil is an eternal deceiver, why believe his accusations? Also, what could possibly be the Devil’s motive in denouncing his own witches when he had to know that to so would lead to their deaths?

Not everyone was insane during the hysteria.

When the trials ended, and the remaining accused were cleared, the torment did not end. Even the innocent were expected to pay for their own jailing, and some remained in jail for months after charges were dropped while their families tried to raise the money to free them.

Mary Beth Norton’s excellent book on the witchcraft trials is a wonderfully written account. Her conclusion deserves repeating:

The foundation of the witchcraft crisis lay in Puritan New England’s peculiar worldview…that taught them that they were a chosen people, charged with bringing God’s message to a heathen land previously ruled by the devil. And in that adopted homeland, God spoke to them repeatedly through signs in the sky (comets, the aurora borealis), natural catastrophes, smallpox epidemics, the sudden deaths of children or spouses, all carried messages from God if only they could interpret the meanings properly. New England Puritans believed themselves to be surrounded by an invisible world of spirits. Satan played a major role in the invisible world. Yet because the devil was one of God’s creatures, Puritans knew that Satan could do no more than God allowed.

The continued and seemingly unstoppable successes of the Indians and French called into question New England’s ability to sustain its northern outposts. That their enemies were Catholics made matters worse, suggesting that the settlers’ own Protestantism might not be destined for the triumph they had long assumed to be inevitable.

In the aftermath of each devastating defeat, they attributed their failures not to mistakes by their military and political leaders, but rather to God’s providence. He had, they concluded, visited these afflictions upon them as chastisements for their many sins. If the devil was operating in Massachusetts with impunity then Massachusetts’ leaders lack of success in combating the Indians could be explained without reference to their own failures.

The leaders of the colony let a small group of girls, led initially by an eleven-year-old, lead hundreds of people on a murderous legal rampage because it relieved them of responsibility for the colony’s real problems.

Of such are all witch hunts made.

What I’m Reading Now are occasional blogs that I post when I start a new book. They are not always immigration related. Here are some other notes I’ve written on books I’ve finished since September 2009:

19. Roger Williams: The Church and the State by Edmund Morgan.

18. Night by Elie Weisel.

17. Mayflower by Nathaniel Philbrick.

16. Champlain’s Dream by David Hackett Fischer.

15. American Jezebel: The Uncommon Life of Anne Hutchinson by Eve LaPlante.

14. The Sovereignty and Goodness of God by Mary Rowlandson.

13. Einstein by Walter Isaacson

12. The Possessed by Elif Batuman.

11. Apostles of Disunion by Charles Dew

10. The Renaissance At War by Thomas Arnold

9. Lincoln and Douglas: The Debates That Defined America by Allen Guelzo

8. Lincoln: Speeches and Wriitings 1832-1858 by Abraham Lincoln