Thompkins H. Matteson’s “Examination of a Witch,” painted in 1853. Photo retrieved from the Salem Witch Trials Documentary Archive and Transcription Project.
By Elliot DiNero
When confronted with danger or uncertainty, there are a variety of methods, tools and mechanisms that humans historically have turned to. Both the use of witchcraft and witch-hunting throughout American history can be analyzed through the lens of perceived risk mitigation. The object at risk can range from individual livelihoods to authority and the survival of the community at large.
An analysis of American witch-hunting, from its Puritan roots to the Satanism panic of the 1980s, demonstratesthat widespread witch hysteria does not take root until three things occur. The first is a directly seen and tangible harm that cannot be, or simply is not, immediately explained. The second is an atmosphere of change which is considered to be a direct threat to the moral or societal establishment of an area and which is usually ascribable to one or more groups living within that society. The third is an initial group of confessions or testimonies of atrocities being spread via rumor. None of these factors can result in a wide-reaching witch hunt alone. However, when all three factors combine they can inspire a perceived risk in enough people’s minds for direct, substantial, and wide-reaching action to be taken against those accused of witchcraft. The Salem Witch Trials, perhaps the most infamous and deadliest witch hunt in American history, earned its reputation as such largely due to the intense combination of these factors.
Puritan New England
New England Puritan communities, as newly established settlements informed by their English roots and Puritanvalues, had both religious and secular reasoning to suspect witchcraft as a cause of misfortune. These values and judgements provided an incentive to prosecute those accused of the practice. One of the commonly espoused missions of these Puritan communities was the wish to create communities which served as a “city upon a hill,” or communities based upon Puritan religious ideals. Official theological teachings forbade the practice and seeking of magic, as it was believed that only God should have control over physical and spiritual affairs. However, forms of magic such as predictive magic, supernatural healing and midwifery were still used.[1] Indeed, while deemed sinful by clergymen, those who did practice often viewed their work as empowering to its beneficiaries with negligible or benign unwanted effects.[2] More explicitly diabolical magic associated with witches, however, was far more readily persecuted in Puritan communities.
Puritan beliefs regarding devil worship and diabolical witchcraft were connected to the various threats to their communities and missions. Individuals engaging in witchcraft put their own desires above their community’s harmony and prosperity. American Historian Carol Karlsen divides the range of transgressions associated with witchcraft into three categories: explicitly religious sins directed against God or the church, mixed religious and sexual sins committed against other members of the community, and predominantly sexual ones committed against the processes of nature.[3] All three can be placed in the context of spiritual threats to Puritan communities and ideals, and the latter two can be categorized as non-religious threats.
Repudiating Puritan ministers was a tacit challenge to the authority and values of the Puritan community. Such an act was viewed as refuting God’s covenanted people and as an affront to God himself. Not only was this seen as an offense to the community, built upon God’s principles, but it also carried the risk of inviting God’s scorn on a community willing to accept such behavior and blasphemy.
Spiritual possessions were a commonly cited example of witches employing spiritual threats to commit crimes against members of the community. Possessions were described as happening in stages, with the first being an attempt to entice the victim into the devil’s services through material desires or other desires before torturous possessions began.[4] Thus, there was a perceived threat of witches attempting to increase their numbers through possession, therefore gaining collective power over the community.
Possessions were not the only way that witchcraft threatened Puritan values. Sins such as unholy copulation with both humans and animals as well as crimes of abortion and infanticide were regarded as crimes against nature. They were viewed as interference with the natural processes of life and death. Puritans believed that no one could wield the supernatural on God’s behalf, for he was the one who controlled these processes. Doing so was also seen as refuting God, his values and his abilities. This was also a spiritual threat as it gave supernatural power to witches and demons and more possible invitations of Godly scorn.
In addition to its religious implications, witchcraft was perceived as a threat to physical community survival as well. Possession was considered a direct psychological and physical attack on the individual who was possessed. Several accounts of significant physical distress in individuals who were thought to be possessed or otherwise bewitched exist. Cotton Mather, a Puritan minister considered one of the most influential religious leaders of his time in New England,wrote about the possession of Massachusetts Bay colonist John Goodwin’s four children in 1688. He described how they were seized with intense pains and temporary paralysis after one of the children was believed to have been cursed by their laundress.[5]
Other forms of bewitchment were believed to be misfortunes surrounding crops, animals, or other economic assetsessential to survival. Not only did this threaten individuals’ lives and livelihoods, but it also greatly impacted chances for the community to be prosperous and grow, particularly in its early stages, and thus continue to attempt to fulfill its mission. These crimes, fittingly, also match Karlsen’s third category of witchcraft transgressions: the interference innatural processes, in this case, life and death.
Moral Combat: Salem Town vs. Salem Village
The changing social and moral dynamics leading to the outbreak of the Salem Witch Hunt can be traced to increasing factionalism between its two major areas: Salem Town and Salem Village. As Salem Town grew into a thriving port city, the wealth entering Salem became increasingly concentrated in the upper merchant class of Salem Town, with 62 percent of Salem’s wealth being controlled by the richest 10 percent of its residents. As the seventeenth century progressed, the average landowner’s property size decreased by nearly half, exacerbating this increasing wealth divide and limiting Salem Village’s prosperity.[6]
This imbalance also was visible in Salem’s political representation. In the second half of the seventeenth century, merchants outnumbered farmers among elected town officials by six to one. Not only were physical and monetary holdings unevenly balanced, but the policies that were drafted and enacted were also more beneficial to the residents of Salem Town than those of Salem Village. Depending on their location within Salem Village, residents could live anywhere from five to ten miles away from the Town, the required turns of military watch of the Town were unevenly burdened on the Villagers. In addition, when thirty-one people signed a petition to the General Court asking for relief from these military watches, they cited that Salem Town was much less vulnerable to attack than the Village.[7] This was due to Salem Town’s much more compact nature compared to the Village’s more spread out farmland residences. Furthermore, until 1689 Salem Village did not have a church. As a result its inhabitants had to travel five to ten miles on a weekly basis to attend spiritual services, an important part of devout Puritan residents’ lives.
Evidence of this clear statistical division and wealth factionalism within the Village itself can be found in the case of Samuel Parris, the church minister of Salem Village at the time of the Salem Witch Trials. A theologically conservative and rigid minister, he rejected leniency in determining church membership. Parris rejected the Halfway Covenant, which brought adults who had been baptized but not made public declaration of faith in favor into partial membership, and offered baptism only to publicly-professed believers. He also called upon church members to formally complain to the County Court about the community committee’s neglect of the church. In 1695, a petition was circulated throughout Salem Village and neighboring churches with the goal of pressuring Parris to step down as minister. A rivaling petition was circulated in support of Parris’ ministry. Those who signed the pro-Parris petition were, on average, in a lower tax bracket than those who signed the anti-Parris one. In addition, petitioners living furthest from Salem Town, who were therefore less likely to have meaningful social or economic contact with those from Salem Town, supported Parris at a ratio of four to one. Those who lived closest to Salem Town opposed Parris six to one.[8] Salem Town’s influence on certain members’ wealth also contributed to this divide. While a greater number of people supported Parris, those with more wealth and connections to the town were against him.
The Puritan value most salient during the factional conflict between Salem Town and Salem Village was the idea of working towards the stability and prosperity of the community, rather than any one individual’s prosperity. This concept was stressed in the founding of Salem and many other Puritan communities and articulated as early as 1630, when the first governor of Massachusetts declared “We must be knit together in this work as one man…always having before our eyes our commission and community in the work, our community as members of the same body.”[9] Pursuing one’s own prosperity above that of the community was a sin two-fold: one’s reliance on their private wills and whims was spiritually disrespectful to God and their religion, but the untamed pursuit of individual prosperity also threatened community survival. Diabolic witchcraft was seen not only as a direct physical threat to the community, but also as an attempt to weaken the morals of individuals within that community.
As bitterness between Salem Town and Salem Village grew, the tangible harm and spectral evidence needed to begin a witch hunt appeared. In February of 1692, nine-year-old Betty Parris and her cousin, eleven-year-old Abigail Williams, experienced fits, convulsions and contortions following experimentation with predictive magic. After being inspected by Reverends Deodat Lawson and John Hale, it was determined that these reactions were not possible through natural means and that bewitchment might be to blame. Two more young girls also fell victim to these symptoms. While only three women were initially accused of diabolical witchcraft, more people were placed under suspicion due to accusations by both the victims and those who confessed to practicing witchcraft.
The Snowball
As for who could be accused, targeted individuals were largely associated with values that the Puritans deemed sacrilegious or dangerous to the community. Many of the accused fit stereotypical depictions of a witch’s appearance. Generally, these were middle-aged women with abrasive personalities or a history of bickering. These traits were seen as counterproductive to community harmony, indicative of selfishness, and were associated with witchcraft.[10] Indeed, evidence against accused witch Sarah Good not only included her unwillingness to say that she worshipped God, but also her history of walking away from disagreements while cursing under her breath.[11] In addition, many others were accused due to their association with these women, whether by blood, marriage or close friendship.[12]
Furthermore, as historian Chadwick Hansen suggested, while an individual might have feared their initial symptoms, it is likely that the perceived effects of their symptoms gradually progressed over time. When authority figures and those compelled to confess concluded that such symptoms were the result of witchcraft, affected individuals would become more likely to truly think of themselves as bewitched, considerably worsening their psychosomatic symptoms.[13] These symptoms could manifest whenever there was probable cause to believe that a witch was actively possessing the individual, such as when accusers fell into fits during the interrogation of Sarah Good.[14] When under distress, people are psychologically prone to relying very heavily on patterns related to the circumstances they find themselves under.[15]
Another commonality of the accused in Salem Village was that they had close ties to Salem Town and the perceived degradation of its Puritan values. For example, the owners of two taverns closer to the Town than most Villagers lived, Bridget Bishop and John Proctor, were both accused of witchcraft. Both were tried, charged and hanged for the crime. While their physical proximity to the Town factored into accusations, the fact that their livelihoods were based largely on Town residents also raised suspicions regarding their loyalty to their own financial pursuits as well as to the Town rather than the Village.
Conclusion
While they were neither the first witchcraft trials nor the first witch panic in American history, the swiftness of and amount of people executed in the Salem Witch Trials thoroughly sets them apart from other trials of the seventeenth century. By the end of the year, once the trials had ended and the hysteria had died down, more than 200 people had been accused of witchcraft, 20 had been executed, and an additional five had died while imprisoned. For perspective, excluding the Salem Trials, 93 cases dealing with witchcraft were brought to trial in Massachusetts and Connecticut combined throughout the entirety of the century. Most of these cases were unconnected accusations of a single individual and the cases include civil suits for slander linked to witchcraft, with 16 individuals executed in total.[16] Even the deadliest witch panic before the Salem Trials, the Hartford Witch-Hunt, resulted in a relatively small nine accusations of witchcraft with four executions between 1662 and 1664.[17]
The true impact of the Salem Trials was greater than the sum of its parts. The increasing tension and instability between Salem Town and Salem Village created enough uncertainty and suspicion for rumors and accusations to generate once evidence of physical and psychological harm was presented. As more people were accused of witchcraft, these conditions made it even easier to name villagers who fit the stereotypes of an outsider or saboteur. The psychological biases, as informed by Puritan doctrine and some initial confessions, of both judges and victims, likely ensured that victims kept showing signs of distress and kept naming potential causes of their symptoms.
Endnotes
[1] Richard Godbeer, The Devil’s Dominion: Magic and Religion in Early New England (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992): 52
[2] Godbeer: 54
[3] Carol F. Karlsen, Devil in the Shape of a Woman: Witchcraft in Colonial New England (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1987): 120
[4] Karlsen: 135
[5] Cotton Mather, The Possession of the Goodwin Children, 1688, in The Witchcraft Sourcebook, ed. Brian Levack, (New York: Routledge, 2015): 331-332
[6] Paul S. Boyer and Stephen Nissenbaum, Salem Possessed: The Social Origins of Witchcraft (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University, 1974): 88-89
[7] Boyer and Nissenbaum: 92
[8] Boyer and Nissenbaum: 92-94
[9] John Winthrop, “A Modell of Christian Charity” (1630)
[10] Paul B. Moyer “Diabolical Duos: Witch Spouses in Early New England” (SUNY Brockport) #17-19
[11] Examination of Sarah Good, March 1, 1692
[12] Richard Latner, “The Long and Short of Salem Witchcraft: Chronology and Collective Violence in 1692.” Journal of Social History 42, no. 1 (2008): 137-156
[13] Chadwick Hansen, Witchcraft at Salem, (George Braziller Inc.: 1969): 33-34
[14] Examination of Sarah Good, March 1, 1692
[15] Nate Silver, The Signal and the Noise: Why so Many Predictions Fail- but Some Don’t. (New York: Penguin Press, 2012): 12
[16] Demos, John, Entertaining Satan, (New York: American Heritage Publishing Co. Inc., 1978.): 11
[17] Walter Woodward, New England’s Other Witch-Hunt: The Hartford Witch-Hunt of the 1660s and Changing Patterns in Witchcraft Prosecution, OAH Magazine of History, Vol. 17, No. 4 (2003)