In the Devil's Snare: The Salem Witchcraft Crisis of 1692 (Mary Beth Norton)

Behind most events in the crisis lay gossip.

scholars have tended to discuss incidents involving particular accusers and suspected witches in a chronological context determined by the timing of court proceedings. Yet, as can be seen in appendix 1, prosecutions of suspects followed reported bewitchments at erratic and occasionally lengthy intervals. Employing what might be called a “legal chronology” serves as an effective means of organizing extraordinarily complex materials, but stands in the way of re-creating the burgeoning crisis as people lived through it.12

To explain these anomalies it is necessary to abandon the intense focus on Salem Village common to most studies and to place the witchcraft crisis in the broader context of Essex County and northern New England. As the northeasternmost jurisdiction of the Bay Colony, Essex and its primary port, Salem Town, were deeply involved in the affairs of neighboring frontier settlements. In the 1660s and early 1670s, English outposts in coastal Maine and New Hampshire were at once prosperous, small, and isolated. Fishermen, farmers (especially raisers of livestock), fur traders, and sawmill operators resided quite peacefully alongside the Wabanaki peoples who farmed, hunted, and fished in the interior river valleys. But then King Philip’s War (1675–1678) despoiled the northeastern frontier as well as southern New England, and just a decade later, late in the summer of 1688, another violent conflict erupted in Maine.

What the northern settlers called the First and Second Indian Wars dramatically changed their circumstances for the worse. Flourishing communities were wiped out and people and their property holdings destroyed. Families that had lived in Maine for two or three generations and had sunk deep roots in the soil were either killed or forced to abandon their homes, leaving behind houses, livestock, cultivated fields, and treasured possessions. The consequences were all the more devastating because they happened twice in quick succession:

a significant number of the key accusers and confessors came from Maine. Refugees from one or both wars, they— like many others who fled the frontier with them—sought shelter in Salem Village and nearby Essex County towns. Their families and lives shattered by the vicious frontier warfare, several of these young women were residing as servants in other people’s households. For them, even more than for the longtime residents of Essex County, fears of Indian attack were ever-present, reviving terrifying memories of sudden raids that had killed relatives and friends and obliterated prosperous settlements.

The ongoing frontier war, and the multiple fears it generated—in Maine and New Hampshire, in Essex County, and in Boston itself—thus supplies the answer to the question I posed earlier: why was Salem so different from all previous witchcraft episodes in New England?

I do not argue that Massachusetts officials engaged in a concerted conspiracy of silence, but rather that participants or their descendants decided individually, at different times and places, to remove traces of involvement in the trials from the written record.

Burroughs concluded that “God is still manifesting his displeasure against this Land, he who formerly hath set to his hand to help us, doth even write bitter things against us.”2 When he wrote that letter George Burroughs would not have known that about a week before the attack on York, two little girls living in the house of the Reverend Samuel Parris in Salem Village—a house Burroughs had once occupied—had begun to have strange fits. Nor, unless he had the occult powers eventually attributed to him, would he have known that as a result just three months later he too would personally experience “bitter things.”

Salem, the first permanent settlement in the Massachusetts Bay Colony, was founded in 1626 on a peninsula commanding a superb natural harbor, and the town quickly became the focal point of the area around Cape Ann. Immigrants flowed in during the 1630s, and furs and fish flowed out. The newcomers moved inland to found new towns and to settle in Salem’s own hinterland, first referred to simply as “the Farms.” 4

As the decades passed, friction developed between the Town and the Farms. Residents of Salem Town wanted the tax revenues contributed by residents of the Farms; for their part, the Farmers, though usually outvoted by the more numerous Town dwellers, sought to avoid civic obligations in the distant Town. By the early 1670s the Farmers’ fight for greater autonomy focused on their desire to build their own meetinghouse and to support their own minister. Like other residents of outlying areas of colonial New England settlements, they complained of the long weekly journey to the town center to attend church services, arguing that they should be able to establish their own parish. In October 1672 the Massachusetts General Court agreed to their request. For years thereafter, however, Salem Town still claimed the right to assess Farmers for ecclesiastical expenses, and the Farms, later Salem Village, did not become the independent town of Danvers until 1752.

Thus when one of the Andover men who confessed to witchcraft in the late summer of 1692 explained to the examining magistrates that the devil and his witches had targeted Salem Village for destruction “by reason of the peoples being divided & theire differing with their ministers,” no one would have been surprised by his statement.

Deprived of formal decision-making bodies controlled by Villagers, they always had to appeal to outside authorities—to Salem Town, to the General Court, to synods of ministers, to arbitrators or mediators—to achieve solutions to their conflicts.

Parris, born in England but raised largely in Barbados,

The organization of a church, with twenty-six original members in addition to Parris himself, created a formal, lasting division in the ranks of Villagers.

Nothing more dramatically symbolized that division than the dismissal of nonmembers from the meetinghouse after the sermon on sacrament days, before the members took communion together.

Adding to the exclusionary atmosphere was the church’s decision in early 1690 to reject the so-called Halfway Covenant, which permitted the baptism of infants born to parents who had themselves been baptized but who had not formally joined a church.

In his sermons, Parris likewise tended to stress the sharp distinctions between church members and other folk. Perhaps understandably, therefore, by late 1691 discontent with Parris’s ministry permeated the nearly three-fourths of adult Villagers who had not joined the local church. That discontent took the form of refusing to contribute to his salary or to supply him with firewood, and of organizing for his removal.

Beginning in November 1691, Samuel Parris preached a sermon series on the first verse of Psalm 110: “Sit thou at my right hand, till I make thine enemies thy footstool.” Emphasizing spiritual warfare between the saved and the damned, he told his congregation on January 3, 1691/2, that “the Church is separated from the world,” and that “it is the main drift of the Devil to pull it all down.” The devil, he asserted, was “the grand enemy of the Church,” assisted by “Wicked & Reprobate men,” presumably including his many detractors in Salem Village.10 That was the last sacrament-day sermon Parris’s nine-year-old daughter Betty and his somewhat older niece Abigail Williams heard before they began to behave strangely.

Unknown to the clergymen, however, Mary Sibley, a church member who lived near the parsonage and who therefore saw the children’s sufferings in person, decided to try some traditional countermagic rather than rely on the spiritual methods pursued by Parris and his colleagues. She directed Parris’s Indian slave couple, Tituba and John, in the making of a witchcake. Mixed from the children’s urine and rye meal, baked in the ashes, it was then fed to the family dog. The ingestion of such a witchcake, it was believed, would lead to the discovery of a witch’s identity. And that indeed appeared to happen. Hale and other contemporaries concur that, after the countermagic was employed, “the Afflicted persons cryed out of the Indian Woman . . . that she did pinch, prick, and grievously torment them, and that they saw her here and there, where no body else could.”

Parris was horrified when he learned what had been done without his knowledge. Somewhat more than a month later, before communion on March 27, he admonished Goodwife Sibley in front of the church, charging that “by this means (it seems) the Devil hath been raised amongst us, and his rage is vehement and terrible, and when he shall be silenced, the Lord only knows.” She—a church member!—had, he exclaimed, gone “to the Devil for help against the Devil,” an action “accounted by godly Protestants . . . as diabolical.” Abashed and repentant, Sister Sibley acknowledged “her error and grief for it”; the church accepted her apology.

they took a further step, questioning Tituba herself. She admitted making the cake and said that “her Mistress in her own Country was a Witch” who had taught her some countermagic. But, she declared, “she herself was not a Witch.”

Later tradition transformed her into an African or half-African slave,

the first person identified as a witch in the Salem crisis of 1692 was someone known to all primarily as an Indian. The girls, asked who tormented them, thus named a woman with whom they were intimately acquainted, and who could be seen as representing the people who were then “tormenting” New England as a whole.

English jurists had begun to hold that, as a general rule, children under fourteen were incapable of testifying under oath in court in capital felony cases, although exceptions could be made and adults could describe young children’s behavior. The youth of Parris’s daughter and niece made them possibly questionable witnesses, and so no legal steps were taken against Tituba or other possible witches until older sufferers emerged.

The Salem Village residents who had their first recorded fits on February 25 and who attributed them to an apparition of Tituba were Ann Putnam and Elizabeth (Betty) Hubbard.

Ann (often called Jr.), the twelve-year-old daughter of Thomas and Ann Carr Putnam, church members and staunch…

generally known as Sergeant Thomas because of his post in the local militia, was a veteran of King Philip’s War and the oldest male of the third generation of Putnams in Salem Village. Collectively, the Putnam family had prospered in the Village, its branches controlling substantial property by the 1690s. Yet…

Because Betty Hubbard was the first afflicted person older than fourteen, her torments could well have tipped the balance toward legal action. A seventeen-year-old indentured maidservant of Dr. William Griggs, she was also most likely an orphaned…

As a member of the household of the man who had originally diagnosed witchcraft, Betty—although not living as close to the parsonage as were the Putnams—would have been intimately familiar with the…

Between February 25 and February 28, Betty and Ann Jr. identified not only Tituba but also Sarah Osborne and…

Sarah Warren Prince Osborne, aged about forty-nine in 1692, had moved to Salem Village from Watertown when she wed Robert Prince (whose sister married into the Putnam clan) in 1662. After her first husband’s death, she scandalized Villagers by marrying Alexander Osborne, a young servant whose indenture she purchased. She and her second husband then became involved in a prolonged dispute (still unresolved in 1692) with the father and uncle of Sergeant Thomas Putnam, who were the executors of Robert Prince’s estate. Prince had…

Sarah Solart Poole Good, born in Wenham, was only thirty-eight years old, but she otherwise fit the classic stereotype of a witch. From a prosperous family, she had become impoverished as a consequence of two…

The first three accused witches, then, could be characterized thus: one (Sarah Good) who had been previously suspected of witchcraft by her neighbors; one (Sarah Osborne) who was involved in a legal battle with the family of an accuser; and one (Tituba) who was linked to the Indian…

Readers of In the Devil’s Snare who are familiar with the traditional story of Salem witchcraft will have recognized that something has been missing from my narrative: an account of the afflicted girls…

Usually, authors begin books on Salem with a tale of bored children and teenagers experimenting together with occult practices, especially a venus glass,…

no contemporary source links Tituba to fortune-telling by…

On February 29, Thomas Putnam, his brother Edward, and two men unrelated to any of the afflicted—Joseph Hutchinson and Thomas Preston—filed formal complaints with the Salem magistrates, John Hathorne and Jonathan Corwin, charging the three women with “Witchcraft,

Experienced justices of the peace who had handled hundreds of cases previously, they soon made a crucial decision with immense consequences. Rather than following the customary procedure of conducting preliminary examinations in private, they would interrogate suspects in public. Moreover, in addition to preparing their own summaries of the evidence, they would ask that detailed transcripts be kept. Nowhere did they record the rationale for these actions, but they were probably responding to intense community interest in the witchcraft accusations.

when Sarah Good, the first to be questioned, stood before him in the crowded meetinghouse on March 1, Hathorne began with what to him was the central inquiry under traditional Bay Colony law.37 The 1648 Laws and Liberties of Massachusetts had defined a witch as one who “hath or consulteth with a familiar spirit.” (Such familiars, frequently in the shapes of animals, were believed to link witches to the devil and to suck nourishment from their bodies.)

Four distinct elements combined to create an unstable, often explosive mixture: the magistrates, assuming guilt; the accused, struggling to respond to the charges; the afflicted, demonstrating their torments; and the audience, actively involving themselves in the exchanges by offering information and commentaries. These early records disclose another aspect of the crisis as well: even the closest relatives of the accused sometimes questioned their innocence. William Good and Alexander Osborne were but the first of many to express doubts publicly about their spouses or other relations.

Nathaniel Crouch, a popular writer whose work was also reviewed by the magistrates in 1692, helpfully listed signs that would not appear in the case of “natural diseases.” If the afflicted could reveal “secret things past or to come,” that would occur only with “supernatural assistance.” Or if the afflicted could “speake with strange Languages” or perform feats “far beyond human strength,” those too constituted important evidence, along with an ability to talk without moving the lips. Other possible indications came from such physical signs as their bodies becoming “inflexible, neither to be bended backward nor forward with the greatest force,” or “the Belly to be suddenly puft up, & to fall instantly flat again.”46 From the late sixteenth century on, portrayals of young people’s behavior “in their fits” both accorded with such signs of diabolical activity and bore a striking resemblance to descriptions of the Essex County afflicted in 1692.

Seventeenth-century authors emphasized that in all these cases the devil acted only with God’s permission. “Devils doe much mischiefe, but even by these also doth God worke his will, and these doe nothing without the hand of his providence,” observed the Reverend Mr. Bernard. “Neither Divels, nor Witches, nor wicked men, can doe any thing without the Lords leave.” Thus the occurrence of such phenomena in a household should lead its members to examine their consciences and their behavior, to bear the afflictions patiently, and to engage in fasting and prayer to discern God’s holy purpose behind their troubles. How had they offended God?

A definitive verdict also required ascertaining the precise way in which Satan was creating the torments. Had the devil entered the body and soul of his target, thereby causing possession? Was the devil torturing his victim’s body but leaving the soul untouched, resulting in a different condition known as obsession? Or had the devil used one or more witches as intermediaries to effect the agonies?

Bernard pointed out that although witches could be of either sex, they were more likely to be women than men. Ever since Eve, Satan had preferred to deal with women, who were “more credulous” and “more malicious” when displeased than men, “and so herein more fit instruments of the Divell.”

Above all, female or male, witches were “malicious spirits, impatient people, and full of revenge.”

More important, when the afflicted in their fits saw apparitions, that was, at base, “the devils testimony, who can lye, and that more often then speake truth.” Such evidence alone would be insufficient in a capital case, for even when the devil told the truth, he did so with “lying intent,” seeking “to insnare the bloud of the innocent.” Certainly, Bernard asserted, Satan “can represent a common ordinary person, man or woman unregenerate (though no Witch) to the fantasie of vaine persons, to deceive them and others.”

In the 1680s Increase and Cotton Mather, father and son clerics, both published compilations of witchcraft cases, most of them from New England. The books, which recounted tales of affliction and malefic bewitchment, constituted the Mathers’ contribution to a contemporary English debate over the existence and nature of witchcraft, a debate with no colonial counterpart.

The tormented young people of Tocutt and Groton in the 1660s and 1670s present an alternate model of seventeenth-century afflictions—of a road not followed in Salem Village. In both cases, the devil actually inhabited and spoke through the body of a possessed or obsessed person, which never happened in 1692. Furthermore, one of the young people did not accuse anyone of bewitching him. Although the other did, Samuel Willard, unlike Samuel Parris and his colleagues, did not immediately embrace the accusation.

Because her responses to his questions were contradictory, he regarded Elizabeth Knapp primarily as “an object of pity” and “a subject of hope” rather than as a soul lost forever to the devil.

Samuel Willard in 1671 thus displayed a willingness to question the sorts of statements and behaviors that many Bay Colony magistrates and ministers failed to challenge twenty-one years later. His skepticism indicates that their later credulity need not be seen as the only possible contemporary response to the affliction of young people, and that some explanation of that credulity is required. As the introduction suggested, the impact of the ongoing conflict with the Wabanakis provides much of the necessary explanation, as will become evident in this book’s later chapters.