The Witches

The preliminaries

• The population of New England in 1692 could fit into Yankee Stadium, and nearly all were Puritans.
  • Most thought, breathed, and dreamed in biblical texts and imagery. It would have been difficult to find more than a few people to whom the supernatural was not eminently real. 
• No trace of a single session of the witchcraft court survives. There are accounts of the trials but no records; there are only preparatory papers–depositions, confessions, petitions–and two death warrants.
  • The Salem village record book has been expunged. Instead, what transpired comes to us exclusively from men who were far from thorough and rarely impartial.
• Witches had allegedly troubled New England for years: they drowned oxen, caused cattle to leap from the ground, tossed skillets into the fire, tipped hay, enchanted beer, and sent pails crashing and kettles dancing.

Salem, and the late 1600s, generally

• Salem village consisted of around 90 families, with one practicing physician. 
• Puritans thought everything was a sign or symbol.
  • When a man headed into the marsh with a gun to hunt for dinner and his best pig followed him, it meant something.
  • The fury of hailstones that shattered new windows delivered a providential message.
  • If someone’s daughters twisted and writhed because of witchcraft, their father assumed that he was being punished for his sins.
  • Along with the apocalyptic imagery and the vivid descriptions of hell (if one night’s toothache was painful, imagine roasting for millions of years on everlasting fire!), there were grisly tales of dismembering or abduction.
• A New England parent was obsessively attentive, but also usually could not spare enough attention to all the children they had.
  • Children swallowed pins and fell down wells, through ice, beneath barrels, under horses, upon knives, and into fires and ponds. They regularly succumbed to disease. A Salem parent could count on losing two or three children.
  • ⅓ of New England children left home to live elsewhere, usually as servants or apprentices, usually at age six.
    • As a result, most households included several unrelated adolescents. Boys learned a trade while girls mastered housewifery. This was called “binding out.”
    • This introduced a fresh set of perils – servant girls fended off groping hands and unwanted embraces, often at appallingly early ages.
    • Masters and mistresses beat child servants for being disrespectful, disorderly, abusive, sullen, or lazy.
• Legal trials at this time were incredibly different.
  • While the accused could challenge the choice of jurors, she could not probe them for their views. With no lawyers, there were no points of procedure to be argued, and no cross examination. 
  • The justices represented both parties, interrogating the suspect and accusers. 
  • Judges didn’t hesitate to tell jurors what they thought or how to evaluate evidence.
    • He could tell them to find a defendant guilty. In the absence of sufficient evidence, strong suspicion would do. 
  • Hearsay was perfectly acceptable, and a suspect had no idea of the evidence against her until she stepped into the courtroom, where she could be convicted of a different crime than the one for which she stood indicted.

What exactly was a witch?

• Directly or indirectly, the definition begins with Joseph Glanvill, an English academic, clergyman, and philosopher from the 17th century.
  • A witch is one who can do or seems to do strange things, beyond the known power of art and ordinary nature, via a confederacy with evil spirits. They could transform into animals, and were most often female (as females were weaker willed). They usually kept a wide array of strange animals, and toads were a universal favorite.
  • The witch bore a mark on her body indicating her unnatural compact with spirits. Those marks could be blue or red–essentially any dark blemish qualified.
• Witchcraft usually ran in families, along matrilineal lines.
• Enchantment manifested as trances, paralyzation, fits, jaws clamped shut, frothing, gnashing, and violent shaking.
  • Witches managed to be two places at once or emerge dry from a wet road. They walked soundlessly over loose boards. They arrived too quickly, prophesied the contents of unopened letters, spun suspiciously fine linen, cultured uncommonly good cheese, knew secrets for bleaching cloth, smelled figs in someone else’s pocket, and survived falls down stairs.
  • Witches could be muttering, or could be inexplicably strong and smart. They often had more wit than their neighbors (as one minister had said of the third Massachusetts woman hanged for witchcraft, in 1656).
• Witchcraft in other countries:
  • Germany was slow to prosecute–initially uninterested in witches–but afterward fanatical.
    • One German town managed to hang 400 witches in a single day. 
    • One inquisitor boasted that he had cleared the land of 900 witches in 15 years. 
  • An Italian bested him with 1,000 deaths in a year. Between 1580 and 1650, Great Britain dispensed with no fewer than 4,000 witches.
  • Witches could make the trip from England to North America largely intact.
• What constituted sufficient proof of witchcraft?
  • A free and voluntary confession was the gold standard. Evidence of spell-casting or secret-divining was dispositive, as were feats of unusual strength. When credible men and women testified to these things, the evidence was considered sound.
  • A magistrate can make you believe things about yourself that are not true. With a suggestible witness and an authority figure, it is not uncommon to wind up with a planted memory.

How the Salem witch trials unfolded

• Things began in Samuel Parris’s household, the Salem village minister.
  • His 11 year old niece, Abigail Williams, was afflicted first, and then Parris’s daughter, 9 year old Betty, exhibited the same symptoms.
    • They complained of bites and pinches by invisible agents, they barked and yelped, their bodies shuddered and spun, and they went limp. Any mention of God sent them into intolerable anguish.
  • Soon, the girls made their accusations – there were three witches loose in Salem.
  • After that, 12 year old Ann Putnam, daughter of Thomas Putnam, began to shudder and choke, and Elizabeth Hubbard, a 16 year old girl, began to convulse as well.
• They identified Sarah Good, who was soon arrested with a formal witchcraft charge.
  • Good was a semi-itinerant beggar and a local menace. She was allegedly spiteful, insulting, and threatening.
  • On March 1, 1692, she was delivered to Ingersoll’s tavern, where her interrogation began. The four girls stated that Good was the woman who hurt them, and when they came face-to-face with her, each began to thrash. Good adamantly denied that she was a witch.
  • Someone else said that William Good was suspicious of his wife, saying that she either was a witch or would be one very quickly. Good also said that he had noticed a witch’s mark – a sign the devil was known to stamp on his recruits – on her right shoulder. 
  • Sarah Good was sent to prison.
• Another woman, Sarah Osborne, was apprehended and her house searched for evidence. The girls clarified that both Osborne and Good tortured them.
  • Osborne was soon arrested, as was Parris’s Indian slave, Tituba.
• A week after their arrest, Sarah Good (and her infant), Sarah Osborne, and Tituba were carted off to await trial in Boston’s prison.
• 5 witches were accused in March and 25 witches in April.
• Sarah Osborne soon died in a rank cell in the coldest months of the year on scant rations and in heavy irons. Even though no one ascribed her death to witchcraft, she was Salem’s first casualty. 
• On May 18, 9 people testified to 19 different affiliations, and more people (men and women) were arrested and thrown in jail, including a woman named Bridget Bishop.
  • She was ultimately ordered to be hanged. The day of her hanging, a carnival atmosphere prevailed, while an officer read her death warrant. She insisted on her innocence. Nonetheless, she died by slow strangulation, letting out blood curdling groans–it could have taken an hour for her to die.
• On July 19, the rancorous Sarah Good, along with four other women, were prepared to be hanged.
  • Good’s 5 year old daughter, Dorothy, was shackled in a prison where Good had lost the infant she nursed at the time of her arrest. 
  • As she stepped to the gallows, one man was eager to get a confession and shouted that Good had engaged in great wickedness, and she snapped, “You are a liar. 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!”
• As August approached, the confessions and accusations piled up, which meant more  arrests and more intricate accounts.
• When the trials stopped and things settled down, for some, it was impossible to return to normal.
  • For instance, a group of siblings convicted their mother, and once she was hanged they were orphaned and found that everyone saw them as the spawn of a woman immortalized as the queen of hell.
  • Sarah Good’s daughter, little Dorothy, had spent 8.5 months in miniature manacles, and her infant sister died before her eyes. She had watched her mother, against whom she had testified, head to the gallows; ultimately, Dorothy went insane.
  • Two other women, each hanged, left seven children–as a result of the trials, there were many, many orphans.
  • Many people chose to forget what had happened. A few admitted they had lied; others insisted that they did not remember their testimony.
• We will never know the extent of the lies.

The Salem legacy

• Salem represents a blindingly self-righteous crusade against evil, which has appeared in American politics in many forms: heated exaggeration, suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy.
  • That apocalyptic strain still bleeds into our thinking–we naturally look for traitors, terrorists, and secret agents.
• Massachusetts exonerated the Salem victims in 1710, but overlooked 6 women. On Halloween 2001, the state pardoned the remaining 6, including Susannah Martin and Bridget Bishop.

• An incredible background nearly every single accusation, every single accused witch, every single available testimony–making for a remarkable historical review
• A focus in particular on family members who testified against each other, and the complicated havoc that wrought
• The peculiar witchcraft of Andover, Massachusetts (where 50 witches turned up in a town of 600 people)
• An impressive detailing of life in the 1690s, which helps one understand how these people came to so deeply believe that there were witches among them