In the Devil's Snare: The Salem Witchcraft Crisis of 1692

525 Pages·2003·4.082 MB·English

by  Mary Beth Norton

Table of Contents
Title Page
Dedication
Praise
Introduction
CHAPTER ONE - Under an Evil Hand
SALEM VILLAGE
“SADLY AFFLICTED”
THE FIRST EXAMINATIONS
TORMENTED YOUNG PEOPLE AND NEIGHBORING WITCHES
CHAPTER TWO - Gospel Women
THE ACCUSATIONS OF MARTHA COREY AND REBECCA NURSE
THE EXAMINATION OF MARTHA COREY
“A WOMAN OF YOUR PROFESSION”
TWO SERMONS AND A DIABOLIC SACRAMENT
THE PROCTORS, THEIR MAID, AND SARAH CLOYCE
THE THIRD CONFESSION
CHAPTER THREE - Pannick at the Eastward
THE FIRST INDIAN WAR
THE SECOND INDIAN WAR BEGINS
THE DISASTERS OF 1690
A WAR OF ATTRITION
CHAPTER FOUR - The Dreadfull Apparition of a Minister
FOUR SUSPECTS AND ANOTHER CONFESSION
“A WHEEL WITHIN A WHEEL”
NINE ACCUSATIONS AND ANOTHER IMPORTANT CONFESSOR
ANOTHER ACCUSER FROM MAINE AND HER FIRST TARGET
SOME “USUAL SUSPECTS”
A CONFEDERATE OF THE DEVIL
CHAPTER FIVE - Many Offenders in Custody
TWO MALE WITCHES AND TWO MORE CONFESSORS
THE SECOND CONFESSIONS OF ABIGAIL HOBBS AND MARY WARREN
CONTINUED PROCEEDINGS UNDER NEW AUSPICES
AN AFFLICTED FORMER CAPTIVE AND HER MISTRESS
SOME USUAL AND UNUSUAL SUSPECTS
CHAPTER SIX - Endeavors of the Judges
PREPARING FOR THE TRIALS
THE TRIAL AND EXECUTION OF BRIDGET BISHOP
QUESTIONS AND CAVEATS BEGIN
THE SECOND SESSION OF THE COURT OF OYER AND TERMINER
CHAPTER SEVEN - Burroughs Their Ringleader
THE CRISIS BROADENS
THE COURT’S THIRD SESSION (1)
THE COURT’S THIRD SESSION (2): THE TRIAL OF GEORGE BURROUGHS
THE WONDERS OF THE INVISIBLE WORLD
CHAPTER EIGHT - All Sorts of Objections
THE FINAL SESSION OF THE COURT OF OYER AND TERMINER
THE DISSOLUTION OF THE COURT
THE FINAL TRIALS
Appendix I
Appendix II
Appendix III
Appendix IV
Conclusion - NEW WITCH-LAND
Acknowledgments
Epilogue
Notes
About the Author
ALSO BY MARY BETH NORTON
Copyright Page
For the other Americanists and the other women
in the Cornell history department, and especially for
I. V. (Itsie) Hull
Acclaim for Mary Beth Norton’s IN THE DEVIL’S
SNARE
A Los Angeles Times Best Book of the Year
A Boston Globe Best Book of the Year
A Newsday Best Book of the Year
“Compelling. . . . Provocative and persuasive. . . . [This book] also provides
a poignant reminder of how the perceived failure of leaders to defend their
people against an external threat, then, as now, can lead to terrible efforts to
purge the demons within.”
—Chicago Tribune
“Dazzling, even suspenseful. . . . Norton, the master historian-detective, has
pointed to a glaring clue about the origins of the Salem witchcraft crisis.”
—Fresh Air, NPR
“What we have . . . is not merely a compelling study of Salem witchery, not
merely a nuanced piece of archival research, and not merely an engaging
retelling of a favorite seventeenth-century tale. We have a standard-bearer
for American history.”
—Newsday
“Brilliant. . . . It is difficult to communicate the full horror of what
happened in such a dismal time in our country’s history, but Mary Beth
Norton does a superb job. . . . Her conclusions are ground-breaking.”
— The Baltimore Sun
Introduction
How long have you been in the snare of the devil?
—Justice of the Peace John Hathorne, 1692
SALEM. The word alone evokes persistent images in the minds of twenty-
first-century Americans: the misogynistic persecution of women, hysterical
girls telling tales of being tormented by specters, falsely accused “witches”
bravely refusing to confess, even—erroneously— women being burned at
the stake. Few other events in colonial American history have so fascinated
modern residents of the United States; few other incidents in the
seventeenth-century Anglo-American colonies have been so intensively
studied by historians. And yet much of the complicated Salem story
remains untold. In the Devil’s Snare is my narrative of that untold tale.
The basic facts can be briefly summarized. The witchcraft crisis began in
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mid-January 1691/2, O.S., when two little girls living in the household of
the Reverend Samuel Parris of Salem Village (now Danvers),
Massachusetts, began to suffer from fits that they and their elders soon
attributed to witchcraft. In the months that followed, growing numbers of
accusers claimed to be tortured by the apparitions of witches, and to see the
ghosts of dead people charging the witches with killing them. Other
accusers—most commonly neighbors of the suspects—came forward as
well, to describe how they and their animals had been bewitched by the
malefic acts of the accused. Around mid-September the crisis began to
wane, and it limped to a close on November 5 with the filing of complaints
against the last three witches to be formally charged. Legal proceedings
extended from February 29, 1691/2 (the first official complaints), to late
May 1693 (the final trials of suspects).
Those months encompassed legal action against at least 144 people (38
of them male), most of whom were jailed for long periods; 54 confessions
of witchcraft; the hangings of 14 women and 5 men; the pressing to death
of another man by heavy stones; and the deaths in custody of 3 women and
2
a man, along with several infants. Throughout the crisis, the most active
accusers were a group of young Salem Village and Andover women ranging
in age from eleven to twenty, several of them servants (see appendix 3).
Accordingly, as in no other event in American history until the rise of the
women’s rights movement in the nineteenth century, women took center
stage at Salem: they were the major instigators and victims of a remarkable
public spectacle.
Scholars have developed a variety of interpretations of the crisis. Some
have detected natural causes for the girls’ visions of ghostly specters: ergot
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poisoning or, most recently, an encephalitis epidemic. One has argued that
at least some of the accused really were practicing witchcraft and thus that
some of the charges had merit. Several historians contend that the girls were
faking their fits from the start, others that they were hysterical, angry, or
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delinquent adolescents. The influential Salem Possessed (1974), by Paul
Boyer and Stephen Nissenbaum, attributes the crisis to long-standing
political, economic, and religious discord among the men of Salem Village,
denying the significance of women’s prominence as both accused and
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accuser.
My narrative builds on the research and interpretations advanced in prior
works on Salem; at the same time, it disagrees with many aspects of those
interpretations. In addition to studying the trials, as have most other
historians, I examine the broader crisis that produced the trials. Indeed, the
search for documents to illuminate the origins and extent of that crisis has
led me in directions I failed to anticipate when I first embarked on this
project. Intrigued by the complex interrelationship of gender and politics in
early America, I expected to base this volume largely on a feminist
reinterpretation of familiar materials, primarily the court records published
in the Salem Witchcraft Papers and other documents commonly consulted
by Salem scholars. But I also wanted to learn how people in Essex County
and New England in general (perhaps even in other colonies) reacted to the
witchcraft allegations. Thus when I read published materials or visited
archives, I cast my net widely, looking for correspondence and journals
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covering the entire period of the late 1680s through the early 1690s.
What I found has led me to develop a new interpretation of the witchcraft
crisis, one that places it firmly in the context of its very specific time and
place: Essex County, Massachusetts, in the early 1690s. The county’s
residents were then near the front lines of an armed conflict that today is
little known but which at the time commanded their lives and thoughts, as
was demonstrated by the ubiquity of the subject in the letters and diaries I
was reading. They called it the Second Indian War. Early American
historians today term it King William’s War. Whatever the name, after 1688
that struggle with the French and the Indians for control of New England’s
northeastern frontier dominated public policy and personal decisions alike.
Historians have examined Salem Village itself, Massachusetts legal
practice, and Puritan attitudes toward women, all of which provide essential
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background for comprehending the witchcraft crisis. In the Devil’s Snare,
though, contends that the dramatic events of 1692 can be fully understood
only by viewing them as intricately related to concurrent political and
military affairs in northern New England.
Other scholars have touched on connections to the Second Indian War
but did not explore them in detail. In the 1980s, I learned from Carol
Karlsen’s The Devil in the Shape of a Woman and an article by James
Kences that some of the “afflicted girls” of Salem Village were refugees
from the Maine frontier. When I started my research, I expected the
accusers’ familial origins to prove to be important for my analysis, but I had
no idea that this book would become what it has: an exploration of the
history of frontier warfare and its impact on the collective mentalité of an
entire region. Yet the more I read the documents produced in New England
in the last quarter of the seventeenth century, the more I realized that the
evidence required such an approach. The histories of King William’s War,
King Philip’s War (its equally brutal predecessor in the 1670s), and the
Salem witchcraft crisis are intricately intertwined. In the Devil’s Snare