The Story of the Salem Witch Trials: "We Walked In Clouds and Could Not See Our Way"

320 Pages·1997·7.52 MB·English

by  Bryan F. Le Beau

T S
he tory

of the
S W T
alem itch rials
"We Walked In Clouds and Could Not See Our Way."
Bryan F. Le Beau
Creighton University
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Le Beau. Bryan F,
The story of the Salem witch trials : “We walked in clouds and
could not see our way.” / Bryan F. Le Beau.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-13-442542-1
1. Trials (Witchcraft)—Massachusetts—Salem. 2. Salem
(Massachusetts)—History—Sources. I. Title.
KFM2478.8.W5L43 1998
345.744'50288—dc21 97-5456
CIP
Editor-in-Chief: Charlyce Jones Owen
Production Editor: Jean Lapidus
Prepress and Manufacturing Buyer: Lynn Pearlman
Copy Editor: Michele Lansing
Photo Research: Rona Tuccillo
Cover Design: Rosemarie Votta
Cover Image: A painting by T. H. Matteson, titled Examination of a Witch, 1855.
Photographer: Mark Sexton. From the Peabody Essex Museum, neg. #17292.
Sub-title: from John Hale, A Modest Inquiry into the Nature of Witchcraft (1702). (See
Bibliography)
This book was set in 10.5/12.5 Century Schoolbook by BookMasters, Inc.
and was printed and bound by Courier Companies, Inc.
The cover was printed by Phoenix Color Corp.
© 1998 by Prentice-Hall, Jng>
Simon & Schuster/A Viacom Company
Upper Saddle River, New Jersey 07458
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be
reproduced, in any form or by any means,
without permission in writing from the publisher.
Printed in the United States of America
10 987654321
ISBN D-13-4425H2-1
Prentice-Hall International (UK) Limited, London
Prentice-Hall of Australia Pty. Limited, Sydney
Prentice-Hall Canada Inc., Toronto
Prentice-Hall Hispanoamericana, S.A., Mexico
Prentice-Hall of India Private Limited, New Delhi
Prentice-Hall of Japan, Inc., Tokyo
Simon & Schuster Asia Pte. Lid., Singapore
Editora Prentice-Hall do Brasil, Ltda., Rio de Janeiro
To
John Philip English

Contents
Preface ix
1 "A Biography of a Terrible But
Perfectly Normal Superstition"
The Origins of European Witchcraft 2
The Development of European
Witchcraft 4
The Great European Witch-hunt 7
A Summary View of Witch-hunts in
England 18
2 "Having Familiarity with the Devil"
Witch-hunts in Seventeenth-Century
America 24
vi Contents
Witch-hunts in Seventeenth-Century
New England 26
Some Notable Witch Trials in
Seventeenth-Century
New England 34
The Pattern of Witch-hunt Activity in
Seventeenth-Century New England 43
3 "The Evil Hand" Is upon Them 49
A Glimpse at Salem’s Past 49
The First Signs of the Devil 60
The Hearings Begin 68
4 "Is Not This a Brand Plucked From
the Burning?” 75
The Cases of Martha and Giles Corey
and Dorcas Good 75
The Case of Rebecca Nurse 83
Deodat Lawson’s Lecture Day Sermon 87
Sarah Cloyce Is Charged 90
Mary Easty Is Summoned 93
The Pace Quickens 95
5 "If They Are Let Alone We Should
All Be Devils and Witches" 101
The Cases of Elizabeth and John
Proctor 101
Mary Warren Tries to Recant 106
Bridget Bishop and Abigail Hobbs
Are Charged 109
Seven of the Nine Are Formally
Charged 112
Contents vii
The Ordeal Begins for Mary and
Philip English 116
The “Black Minister” Is Apprehended 121
Dorcas Hoar Is Jailed 128
6 "God Will Deliver Us Out of
the Hands of Unmerciful Men" 129
The Case of George Jacobs Sr. 129
John Willard Changes Sides 133
Daniel Andrew Is Charged 137
The Carys Escape 138
John Alden Is Arrested 140
The Andover Witch-hunt 142
7 "God Will Give You Blood
to Drink" 152
The Court of Oyer and Terminer
Is Established 155
Bridget Bishop Is Tried 158
The Court Completes Its First Session 165
The First Mass Execution and
Its Effects 170
8 "What a Sad Thing It Is to See
Eight Firebrands of Hell
Hanging T here" 17 3
The Case of George Burroughs 173
The Proctors Are Condemned 175
The Cases of George Jacobs Sr., John
Willard, and Martha Carrier 177
The Hangings of August 19 178
The Trials of September: The Cases
of Martha Corey and Mary Easty 181
viii Contents
The Ordeal of Giles Corey 183
The Mood in September 1692 187
The Confessions of 1692 189
9 "It Were Better That Ten
Suspected Witches Should
Escape, Than That One Innocent
Person Should Be Condemned"
Voices Are Raised in Opposition to
the Trials 196
Phips Dismisses the Court of Oyer
and Terminer 201
The Jails Are Emptied 206
The Superior Court of Judicature 208
The Magistrates and the Court of
Oyer and Terminer, Guilty
As Charged? 211
10 "Ruined in the Mistaken
Management of the Terrible
Affair Called Witchcraft"
Cotton Mather and His “Wonders of
the Invisible World” 216
Salem in Ruins 223
The Repenting Begins 230
Settling Up 236
Epilogue
Notes
A Select Bibliography
Appendix
Index
Preface
Between June 10 and September 22,1692, nineteen people were hanged
for witchcraft in Salem, Massachusetts. One man was pressed to death, and over
150 others from twenty-four towns and villages went to jail, where four adults
and one infant died and some remained until the following May. Compared to
other witch-hunts in the Western world, it was a minor affair, or as one histo­
rian has put it, “a small incident in the history of a great superstition.”1 It was
the largest of its kind in the British colonies of North America, however, and it
has never lost its grip on either the popular or scholarly imagination.
Historians often protest that too much time has been spent and too
many pages have been written on the Salem witch trials, but they neverthe­
less continue to fill library shelves with books on the subject and to engage in
sometimes heated debate over its causes. And there is no indication that any
of this is likely to end soon. Nor should it, as the Salem witch trials remain
one of the most interesting, indeed dramatic, as well as meaningful, episodes
in history. Still, we wonder how such a tragic event could have ever occurred.
It would be impossible to review all of the answers historians
have offered to this question. The most persuasive have pointed to the eco­
nomic, political, social, and religious turmoil into which New England was
plunged at the end of the seventeenth century; to New Englanders’ beliefs that
the turmoil from which they suffered had resulted from their fall from grace as
God’s chosen people, thereby making them vulnerable to a “conspiracy of
witches and the Devil;” to the mistreatment of the Salem village youngsters who
first fell victim to some form of psychic, if not spiritual, affliction, promoting un­
controllable fear on the part of some and fraud on the part of others; to the
Court’s inappropriate use of evidence in hearings for the accused against which
there was hardly any defense; to inordinate pressure brought to bear upon the
accused to confess and name their accomplices in order to escape almost certain
execution; and, finally, to the failure of authorities to act earlier and more deci­
sively when serious questions were raised regarding the conduct of the Court.
These explanations are central to this book.
As far as it is possible in any single volume, this book provides a syn­
thesis of the major schools of thought on the Salem witch trials. It goes to con­
siderable length to place the events of 1692 into a historical context, both of
seventeenth-century New England and of the Great European Witch-hunt,
which lasted some three centuries. Without such context, when viewed in iso­
lation, the events of 1692 are impossible to understand. It employs a narra­
tive format that ^as once popular among historians but that has fallen out of
ix
X Preface
favor. Such an approach is intended to make the subject more accessible to the
reader, to recapture some of the drama that has held people spellbound for so
long, and to suggest yet another way of looking at the event. As Larry Gragg
has reminded us, to fiilly appreciate what happened in 1692, we must “explore
the particular decisions made by the individuals involved and their conse­
quences?2 When all other avenues of interpretation have been exhausted, we
are left with the fact that individuals and individual decisions matter.
The first chapter of this book provides a brief history of European witch­
craft. It seeks its origins in pagan antiquity and in the perspective Christians
developed about the Devil during the first centuries of its formation. It shows
that European witchcraft was mostly a creation of the Early Modem Period,
or from the fifteenth through the seventeenth centuries, and that it was in this
period that the practice of witchcraft came to be seen not only as dangerous
but also heretical and threatening to church and state. The concluding pages
of chapter one focus on witch-hunts in England, in reference to which the most
direct comparisons can be made to developments in New England.
Chapter two narrows our focus to seventeenth-century America. After
some brief allusions to the fate of supposed witches in the Spanish, French,
and Dutch, as well as other British colonies, it discusses the treatment of
witches in New England. Two points are made. First, that what was commonly
believed to be witchcraft was practiced in seventeenth-century New England,
as it was elsewhere in the Western world. Second, although what happened in
1692 far exceeded anything that occurred before in New England, there were
precedents for the Salem witch trials. The chapter concludes with some dis­
cussion of those precedents, as well as of the state of affairs in the second half
of the seventeenth century that led colonists to conclude that they were the
victims of diabolical assault.
Chapter three discusses the origins of the Salem witch trials. It begins by
exploring the difficulties Salem village faced in the closing decades of the seven­
teenth century. It explains the problems the Reverend Samuel Parris had with
his congregation and community, and the goings-on in his home during the win­
ter of 1691-1692 that sparked the flames that consumed Salem village. It con­
cludes with an account of the initial terrors of the young women of Salem village
and the first charges of witchcraft they brought against the most likely suspects.
Chapters four through six provide an overview of the principal arrests and
preliminary examinations of those taken into custody before the Salem town
magistrates. They show how what might have been just another local and lim­
ited scare, similar to the dozens that had preceded it in seventeenth-century
New England, became the region’s only true witch-hunt. Emphasized are key
hearings, major developments, decisive decisions, and important turning points.
Shown is how those charged by the young girls who led the prosecution came in­
creasingly from higher rungs on the social ladder. And, included for comparative
purposes, chapter six contains an account of developments in Andover, Massa­
chusetts, the site of the single largest witch-hunt outside of Salem.
Chapters seven through nine cover what were actually the Salem witch
trials. It is at this juncture in the story that, although the preliminary hear­