CHAP ] LR 2 The Visible and Invisible !’Vorlds of Salem

Historians, we have seen, are in the business of reconsm~ction. Seventeenrl> century Virginia, with its worhl of slaves, indentured smwants, and tobacco barons, had to be built anm~5 not just lifted intact fiom the record. It fi~llows, fl~en, tbat if historians are builders, they must decide at fl~e outset fl~e scale of their pro}errs. How much ground should be covered? A year? FlAy years? Sev- eral centuries? ttow will the subiect matter be defined or limited? ’]"he story of slavery~ arrival in Virginia might be ranked as a moderateb, large topic. It spans some siW years and involves O~ousands of hnmigrants and an entire colony. Furthermore, the topic is large as much because of its content as its reach over time and space. The genesis of slaveW snrely ranlo as a cen~-al strand of the American experieuce. ~?~ understaud it adequately requires more breadth of vision d~an, for instance, u~dersmnding O~e history of ~nerican hats during the same period. The lure of topics both broad and signi~cant is tmdeniable, and there have always been historians willing m put! on their seven-league boots, following in fl~e houorable tradi6on of Edward Gibbon’s Decl~e ~,~d Fall qf the Roma~ E~npire. The gre~t equalizer of such grand plans is ~e twen~-fom--hour day. His- torians have only a limited amouat of time, and the hom~, they sadly dis- cover, are not expandable. Obviously, the more years covered, the less time available to research the events in each. Conversely, fl~e narrower ~e area of research, the mbre the historian can become immersed in a period~ details. .A keen mind working on an apparently small topic may uncover relation- Ships and connections whose significance goes beyond ~e zubject matter’s original boundaries. Salem ~Sllage in 1692 is such a microcosm~one familiar to most students of ~nerican history. That was the place and the time witchcra~ came to New England with a vengeance, dominating the life of the village for ten months. Becat~se rbe episode exhibited welbdefined boundaries i~ 24 ~oth nme at~d sl)ace, it shows well how an ot~-told stot~ may be transformed by me lntenb,ve reseat ch techmques of small-sca e h stoo. > admonal y me outbreak at Salem bas been v~ewed as au incident &vorced fi’om the cause- and-effect sequences of everyday village li[?. I~ven to label the eveuts as an "outbreak" suggests tbat they are best viewed as an epidemic, alien to the corn numtys nornal ~ncUons. the gm ~s of bewitchment break ont sud- denly and inexplicably~agents, presumably of some invading disease. Over fl~e past decades, however, bistoriaus have studied tbe tra~ natic experiences of lo9z in great ~ ...... 1. n~ so doing d~oy h:~ve created a more sophis~cated model of the meutat world behind the Salem outbreak. They have also suggested ways in which the witchcraft episode was tied to tbe evewday events of~llage life. The techoiqnes of small-scale histo,T, in other words, have provided a compelling psychologica! and social context tbr the events of 1692.

,,’7" BEWITCHMENT AT SALEM VILLAGE The baffling troubles experienced in Salem Village began during the winter of 169I 1692 in fl~e home of the village’s minister, . There, Parrls’s ni~m-year-old daughcer Betq, and his niece bad taken strangely ill, claiming that ~ey had been "bitteu and pinched by invis ible agents; ~eir arms, necks, and backs turned d~is way and d~at wag and returned back again.., beyond the power of any Epileptick Fits, or natural Disease m effect." La ~er eraditions~not necessarily reliable~suggesred tha ~ the afflictions catne after a group of girls met to divine what sort of men ¯ dr fi~mre husbands mi0~t be, a subject of natural enough interest. Lack ing a crystal ball, they used the next available substitute, the white of a raw egg suspended in a glass of watec At some point during these con~uringks, things went sour. One of the girls thought she detected % specter in the like hess of a coffin" in the glass~bardly an auspicious omen. Soon Bett)~ fl~e youngest of the girls, began complaining of pinchiug, priclding sensations, lmffelike pains, and ~he fedJng fl~at she was bring choked. In the weeks r!~a~ followed, three more girls e~ibited similar s~nptoms. ~atever fl~e cause of rt~e yotmg gMs’ symptoms, the Revm’end Parris was at a loss m m~derstand O~e afflic~ons, as were several doctors and ministers he brought in to observe the strange beha~ors. ~aen one doctor hinted at the possibiliw of witchcraft, a neighbor, MaW Sibley, suggested putOng to use a bit of New England folldore to reveal whe~er O~ere had been aW sorcery. Sibley persuaded two slaves IMng in ~e Parris household, John Indian and his wife, Timba, to bake a "witch cake" made of we meal and urine given them by ~e girls. T~e cake was fed to a dog~Ne theotT of bewitchment confirmed, presumably, if the dog suffered torments similar to those of the aNivted ~rls. T~i~ experiment seems to have t~igbtened O~e girls even *note, for ~eir s~pmms worsened. Thoroughly alarmed by the symptoms, Parris and sev- eral o~er adults pressed ~e girls for the identiv of ~e specters O~ey believed AFTER THE FACF: THE ART OF HIS’FORIC~L DETECTION

were tormenting them. Wheu the girls named three women, a formal con> plaint was issued, and on February 29 &e suspec{s were arrested, for, indeed, seventeend>cenmry New Englanders conceived of witchcraft as a crime. If dm girls were being tormented, it was necessaW m punish whoever was responsible. ’l~vo of d~e xvomen arrested, Sarah Good and Sarah Osbourne, were al- ready ~popular in the village. The ~ird accused was Parris’s Indian slave, Tiatba. Timba may have been purchased by Parris during a visit to the Caribbean and was perhaps originally from Sot~th America, Florida, or the Georgia Sea Islands. Under examination hy village magistrates, Sarah Good angrily denied the accusations against her, suggesti*~g instead that Sarah Os- bourne was gui!t)~ Osbourne denied ~e charges, b~t the d)mamics of the hearings changed abruptly when ccmfessed to being a witch. One ac- count of the trials, published eighe years later, reported vhat her admission came after an angw Reverend Parris had beate~ Tituba. For whatever rea- son, she testified that four women and a man were causing the afflictious of the young women. Good and Osbonrne were among them "They ht rt t ~e children," Timba reported. "And they lay all upon me and ~ey tell me if will uot hurt the children, they will burr me." The tale con~nued, complete with apparitions of black and red rats, a yellow dog with a head like a woman, % thing all over haiw, all the face haiw~" and midnight rides m witches’ meetings where plans were being laid to attack Salem. Duriug New England’s first sevenW years, few witchcraf~ cases h~d crone before the courts. Those that had were dispatd~ed quidd)~ and cahn soon re- turned. Salem proved different. In O~e first place, Tituba had described sev- eral other witches and a wizard, though she said she was unable to identify them. The villagers felt 0my could not rest so long as these agents remained at large. Furthermore, dm yolmg women contim~ed to name ~lames~and now not just communig; outcasts but a wide varie~ of ~llagers, some spectable church memhers. The new suspects ~oined Timba, Sarah Good, and Sarah Osbourne in jail. By fine end of April the hunt had led to no less a personage than the Reverend , a former mi~ister of the village li~ng in Maine. Constables marched to Maine, fetched him hack, aud threw him in jail. ~ If someone confessed to witchcraft~ tbe matter of identification seemed simple enough. But if ~e accused reused to admit ~ilt, then the magis- trates looked for corroborating proof. Physical evidence, such as voodoo dolls and pins found among the suspect’s possessions, were considered criminating. Fur~ermore, if the de~l made a pact with someone, he suppos- edly required a physical mark of allegim~ce and thus created a "witch’s fit" where ¢i~mr he or his ~amihar, a likeness in animal form, might s~ck. Pris- oners in ~e Salem ~ials were often examined for any abnormal ~arks on their bodies. it Aside from physical signs, the magistrates considered evidence that witch’s malice might have led to suffering on the part of fi~e victim. ~ud of black magic--harm by occult menus--was aown as msleficis~. lager Sarah Gadge, for example, testified that m~o years earlier she had timed Sar~t~ Good todgiug fi)r the night. According to Gadge, Good "fe~l to mutterillg and scolding extreamly and so told said Gadge if she would not let her in she should give i~er something . . . and the next morning after, to said Deponents best remembrance, one of the said Gadges Cowes Died in a Sudden terrible and Strange unusuall manet." ~a The magistrates also considered wbat they called "spectral evidence," at once the most danming and dangerous kimi of proof. Spectral evidence in- volved the visions of specters--likenesses of the ~vitches--that victims re~ ported seeing during their tormeuts. In an attempt to confirm the co*mection between malice and injury, the magistrates kept the afflicted women in the courtroom to observe their behavior while the accused were being examined. "-\,Vhy doe you hurt these children?" asked , one of the mag- istrates, in a t}@ca] examination. "I doe not hurt O~e*n," replied Sarah Os- bourne. The record continues: "The children abovenamed being all personally present accused her face to face which being don, they ware all hurt, afflicted and tortured veW nmch: which being over and thay ont of theire tilts thay sayd thai said Sarah Osburne did then Come to them and hurt them." 13 Tbe problem with spectra! evideuce was that it could not be corroborated by others. Only the victim saw the shape of the tormentor. Such testfinony ~vas normally controversial, for theologians in Europe as well as in New England believed that spectral evidence should be treated witb caution. ter all, what better way for the devil to spread confl~sion than by assuming the shape of an innocent person? In Salem, however, the magistrates consid- ered spectral testhnony as paramount. ~/Vhen they handed down indict- ments, almost all the charges referred onb~ to the spectra! torments exhibited by accusers during the pretrial hearings. Iq Throughotlt the spring of 1692 no trials of the accused had been held, for the simple reason that Mtassachusetts was without legal govermnent. In 1684 the Crown had revoked the colony’s original charter and set up a new and unpopular government known as the Dominion of New England. But in 1689 YVilliam of Orange forced King James to flee England, and New glanders took that opportunity to overtbrow the Dominion. In the ensuing confusion, court cases had been brought largely to a standstill. The new gov- ernor of Massachusetts, Sir , at last arrived in May 1692 with a roDl charter and quicldy established a special invesdgatoW com-t of oyer and terminer ("to hear and determine") to deal with the witchcraft cases. ts On June 2 the court heard its first case, that of a woman named . Even before the Salem outbreak Bishop had been suspected of witchcraft by a number 91r villagers. She was quickly convicted and, eight days later, hanged fi’om a scaffold on a nearby rise. The site came to be known as Wqtch’s Hill--with good reason, since on June 29 the court ~gain met and ~dnvicted five more women. One of them, , had been found innocent, but the court’s chief justice disapproved the verdict and convinced the jurors to change their minds. On July 19 Nurse joined the other four women on the scaffold, staunch churchwoman that she was, pray- ing for the judges’ souls as well as her own. Sarah Good remained defiant to the end. "I atn no more a witch than you are a wir~ard," she told the attend- ing minister, "and if yo*~ take away my life, God will give you blood to drink." ~t Still the accusations continued; still the court sat. As the net was cast wider, more and more accused were forced to work out their response to the crisis. A few, most of them wealthy, went into hiding until the furor subsided. Giles Cm7, a farmer whose wife, Martha, was executed as a witch, refitsed to "put himself on the country"~that is, submit to a trial by iur> The tradi tional penalty for such a refiasal was the lpeim fort el d~zre, in which the victim was placed between two boards and had heavy stones placed on him until he agreed to plead innocent or guilty. Althoug~q that punishment had been out- lawed in Massachusetts, the court nonetheless carried it ont. CoO, was slowly crushed to death, stubborn to the end. His last words were said to be, "More weight." ~} Solne of the accused admitted guilt, the most satisfsctow solution l’or the magistrates. Pt~ritans could be a remarkably forgiving people. They were not interested in punishment for its own sake. If a lawbreaker gave evidence of sincere regret for his or her misdeeds, Puritan courts would often reduce or suspend the sentence. So it was in the witchcraft trials at Salem @nlil~e most trials in Europe, where confessing witches were executed). But the policy of forgiveness had m~foreseen consequences. Those who were wrongly accused quic!dy realized that if they did not confess, they were likely to be hanged. If they did confess, the), could escape death but would have to demonstrate their sincerity by providing details of their misdeeds and names of other par- ticipants. The temptation nl.ust have been great to confess and, iu so doing, to im.plicate other immcent people. {~ Given such pressures, the web of accusations continued to groin August produced six more ti’ials and five hangings. ; the wife of a tavern keeper, received a reprieve because she was pregnant, the court being unwilling to sacrifice the life of an innocent child. Her husband, John, was not spared, September saw anotlaer eight victims hanged, More d~an a hun- dred suspected witches remained in bil. l~’ Pressure m stop the trials had been building, however. One member of the court, Nad~aniel Saltonstall, resigned in protest after the first execution. More important, the nrdnisters of the province were becoming uneasy. In public they had supported the trials, but privately the}, wrote letters cant!on- ing the magistrates. Finally in early October, , one of the most respected ministers in the colony, published a sermon signed by four- teen other pastors that strongly condenmed the use of spectral evidence. Mather argued that to convict on the basis of a specter, which everyone agreed was d~e devil~,creadon, in effect took Satan at his own w~rd. That, m Mathers vmw, msl~ed &sasten !It were better that ten suspected ,attches .shouldaa lua escaped, than that one innocent person should be cd~emned " he ’~ Mather’s sermon com,inced Governor Phips that the trials had gone too far, He forbade any more arrests and dismissed the court of o)~or and terminen The t5llowing January a new court met to dispose of the remain ing cases, but this time almost all the defendants were acquitted. Phips im- mediately granted a reprieve to the three women who were convicted aud in April released the remaining prisoners. Satan’s controversy with Salem was finished. ¯ ~ That, in outline, is the witchcraft stoaT as it has come down to us tbr so many years. Rightly or wrought, the story has become an h~delible part of American history. The startling fits of possession, the drama of the court ex aminations, the eloquent pleas of the inuocent condenmed--al[ make for a su- perb drama that casts into shadow the rest of Salem’s more pedestrian history. :za- Indeed, the episode is marepresentative. ~vVitchcraft epidemics were not a serious problem in New England and were even less of a problem in other American colonies. Such persecutions were much more common in old England and Fa~rope, where they had reached frightening proportions. ’[’he death of 20 people at Salem is sobering, but the anagnimde of the event di- minishes considerably alongside the estimate of 40,000 to 60,000 people ex- ecuted for witchcraft in early modern Europe. Furthermore, it can be safely said that the witchcraft affifir bad no lasting efI~ct on the political or reli- gious histoW of Alnerica or even of Massachusetts. ~ Now, a curious thing has resulted ftom this i[[umination of a single, iso- lated episode. Again and again the stoaT of Salem Village has been told, quite naturally, as a drama complete unto itself. The workaday history that pre- ceded and followed the trials--the petW town bickerings, the arguments over land and ministers all these elements were for maW years largely passed over. Yet the disturbances at Salem did not occur in a vacumn. They may indeed have constituted an epidemic, but not the sort caused by some mysterious germ pool brought into the village over the rutted roads from Boston. So the historian’s first task is to take the major strands of the witch- craft affair and see how they are woveu into the larger fabric of New En- gland society. Salem Village is small enough that virtually every one of its residents can be identified. We can find o~_ who owned what land, the amount of taxes each resident paid, what sermons people listened to on Sun days. In so doing, a richer, far more intriguing picture of New England life begins to emerge.

°~THE INVISIBLE SALEM Paradoxicaliy, the most obvious facet of Salem life that the historian must recreate is also the most insubstantial: what ministers of the period would have called the "invisible~,world." Demons, familiars, witchcraft, and magic a!l shaped seventeenth-c~nmW New England. For most Salem Villagers, Sa- tan~w.as a living, supernatural being who might appear to people, bargain with th~r~ even enter into agreements. The men and women who submit- ted to such devilish compacts were said to exchange their souls in return for 30 AFTER THE i;’ACT: THE ART OF HISTORICAL DSTEeTION

special powers or favors: mon%~ and good tbrtune, perhaps, or the ability to revenge themselves on others. ag Most often, ordinary folk viewed witchcraft as a simple matter of ci’~¢¢t~.: Sarah Good, for e~:ample, being thought to have caused one of Sarah (~adge’s cows m die after a hostile encounter. The process by which certain people in a communit), gained a reputation ~hr wielding occult power was desccibed well in 1587 by George Gifford, a*~ English minister who was himself qui/e skeptical of the realitT of witchcraft: Some woman doth fall out bitterly wid~ he~ neighbour: there folioweth some grea~ hm’t... There is a suspicion conceived. YVithin few years after, [the same woman] is in some jar [argstment} with another. He is also plagued. This is noted of al!. G~eat fame is spread of the matter. Mother W is a witch. She had bewitched Goodman B. Two hogs died strangely: or else he is taken lame. %~ell, Mother W doth begin to he very odious and terrible unto many. Her neighb~urs dare say nothi~g but yet in their hearts the}, wish she were hanged. Shortly after, another [person] t:alleth sick and’cloth pine; he can hav~ no stom- ach unto his meat, nor he cannot sleep. The neighbonrs come to visit "¥Vell neighhour," sayeth one, "do }m not suspect some naughty dealing: did ye never anger Mother ¥~Q" ’qi’uly neighbour (sayeth he) I hm,e not liked the woman a long time." Such suspicions of witchcragt were widespread in the early modern world. Indeed, the belief in ~nalejici~zm was only one part of a worldview filled with magic and wonders--magic tlrat could be manipulated and pursued by someone with the proper ka~owledge. Fortune-tellers provided a window into the fumce; objects like horseshoes brought good luck; earthquakes and comets warned of God~ judgments. People who possessed more than the usual store of supernatural lmowledge were kmown as "cunning folk" might be called upon in times of trouble to l!eal the illness of a sick villager, cast horoscopes tbr a merchant worried about a ship’s upcoming voyage, or discover what sort of children a woman might bear. The outlines of such beliefs are easily enough sketched, but they convey the emotions of witchcraft about as successfi~lly as a recital of the Apostles’ Creed conveys d~e fire ot the Christia~ faith, it may seem a simple matter to imagine how a Salem Villager who believed iu such wonders might have be- haved, but people who hold beliefs foreign to ore" own do not always act the way that we think they should. Over the years, historians of the witchcraft controversy have faced the challenge of re-creating Salem’s mental world. 2g One of the first people to review Salem’s troubles was Thomas Hutchinson, who in ~750 published a history of New England’s early- days. Hutchinson did not believe in x~qtchcraft; fewer and fewer educated people did as the eighteenth century progressed. Therefore he taaced an obvious question, which centered on the moOvafiohs of the accusers. If ~e devil never actaa!ly ~enauted with vmyone, how were the accusers actions to be explained. Some 6f..~.}~tchinson s eoi~temporaries argued that the bewitched were suffering from ’~gdily disor- ders ~hich affected their imaginations," He disagreed: "A little at*ention must force conv cdon that the whole was a scene of fi’aud ant mposmrh’;’:begma by yoma~’~irls, who at ~irst perhaps ~oaght of noth~g more than being piOed and indulged, and confirmed by admit persons who were aft’aid of being accused themselves." Charles Upham, a n~ster who published a nvo~volume study of the episode in 1867, was equally hard on the yomxg women. "There has sek{om been better acting in a theatre than displayed in the presence of the astonished and horro>s~icken rulers," he concluded tar~ -~’~ Indeed, the historical record does supply some evidence to suggest that the possessed were shamming. X~aen Elizabeth Proctor was accused of be- ing a witch, a friend o~hers tesdfied that he had seen one of the afflicted women cU out, "There’s Goody Proeter{"~ But when people in the room challenged the woman’s claim as mdently false, she backed off, saying only that "she did it for sport; they must have some sport." 8’a A month and a half aAer the hearings had beam, one of the tormented young womeu, MaW ~arren, stopped having her fits. She began to claitu "that the af~icted persons did but dissemble"--that is, that they were sham- ruing. Suddenly the other accusers began to declare that Maw’s specter was afflicting ~mm. Placed on the witness stand, MaW again fell into a fit "that she did neither see nor hear nor soeak." The examination record continued: kftmwards she started up, and said I will speak and cited out, Oh! I am sorW t~)r it, I am sorry lbr it, and wringed her hands, a~d fell a little while into a fit again and {hen came to speak, but immediately her teeth were set, and then she t~!1 into a violent fit and cryed out, oh Lord help me! Oh Good i,ord Save me! And then affe~ard cryed again, I wil! tell I will tell and then fell into a dead fit againe. And affe*~a,ards cryed I will tell~ they did, they did they did and then fell into a violent fit again. After a little recoveW she cryed 7~ will tell they brought me to it and then ~lI into a fit again which fits continueing she was ordered to be had out. SI The scene is tantalizing. It appears as ifNIary ~Varren is about to confess when pressure from the other girls forces her back to hm" former role as one of the afflicted. In the following weeks the magistrates questioned MaW re- peatedly, witJ~ the result that her fits returned and she again ioined in the ac- cusations. Such evidence suggests that the girls may well have been acting. :~a Yet such a theoU leaves certain points unexplained. If the girls were only acting, what are we to make of the many other wimesses who testified to deviltry? One villager, Richard Comans, reported seeing Bridget Bishop’s specter in his bedroom. Bishop lay upon his breast, he reported, and "so op- pressed" him that "he could not speak nor stur, hoe not so much as m awake his wife" sleeping next,to him. Comans and others who testified were not close friends of the gi~s; there appears no reason why they might be con- sDring with each other. How does the historian explain their acti~tls?

1, Goody was short (or Goodwife, a te~m used for most married women. Husbands were ad&’essed as Good~mn. The terms M~ a~d Mrs. were resmwed for those of higher social standing. 3 2 /~WlER TiIE FACTI T}tE i~RT OF H~STORICAL DETEC~rlON 3~ Even some of the afflicted uromen’s behavior is difficult to explain as con- scious fraud. It is easy enough to imagine counterfeiting certain fits: whirling through rl, e room crying "whish, whish"; being struck dumb. Yet other be- havior was truly sobering: being pinched, pummeled, nearly choked to death; contortions so violent several grown men were retluired to restrain the victims. Even innocent victims of the accusations were astounded by such behavior. Rebecca Nurse on the wimess stand could only look in aston ishmeut at the "lamentable fits" she was accused of causing. "Do you think these [afflicted] suf[~r voluntary or involuntary?" asked john Hathorne. "i cannot tell what to think of it," replied Nurse hesitantl?< Hathorne pressed others with similar results. \V}mt ails the girls, if not your torruents? "l do not know." Do yoa think they are bewitched? "I cannot tell." What do you think does all them? "There is more thau ordinaw." ?.’] More than ordinary. Historiaus may accept that possibility without neces- sarily supposing, with Hathorne, the presence of the preternatural, Psychi- atric research has long established what we now take almost for granted: that people may act for reasons they themselves do not folly understand. Even more, that enao~ona! problems *nay be the unconscious cause of apparently physical disorders. The rationalistic psychologies of Thomas Hntchlnson and Charles Upham led them to reject aW middle-%ound explanations of moO- ration. The Salem women had not really been tormented by witches, Hutchinson and Upham reasoned; therefore they must have been acting voI- untarily, consciously. But given the attitudes d~at accompanied a belief in devils and witches, it is possible to understand the Salem episode not as a game of fraud gone out of control, but as a study in abnormal psychology" on a community-wide scale. 3.~ Scholars of the m, entieth century have been more inclined to adopt this medical model as an explanation of Salem’s troubles. Indeed, one of the first to make the suggestion was a pediatrician, Ernest CauIfield. The accused "were not impostdrs or pests or frauds," he wrote in 1943; "they were not cold-blooded malignant brats. They were sick children* in the worst sort of mental distress--living in fear for their very lives and the well;are of their im- mortal souls." Certainly, the fear that gripped susceptible subjects must have been extraordinary. They imagined themselves pursued by agents of the devil, iutent on torment or even *nurder, and locked doors provided no pro- tection. Anthropologists who have examined witchcraft in other cultures note that bewitchment can be traumatic enough to lead to death. An Aus- tralian aborigine who discovers himself bewitched will stand aghast .... His cheeks blanch and his eyes become glassy.... He attempts m shriek but usually the sound chokes in his throat~ and all that one might see is frod~ at his mou~. t{is body begins to tremble and the muscles twist invol- untarily. He sways/backwards and falls to the ground, and after a shoat time ap- ,.p,.e.ars to be in a swoou; but soon after he writhes as if in mortal agony. .~]tm~ard the victim refi~ses to eat, loses all interest in life,:!.Nad dies. AI- t~lgh there were no documented cases of bewitchment death in Salem, the anthr9pological studies indicate the reinarkable de 3th of reaction po~ssible in a co*ffmunity that believes in its own magic2 3~ Historian Chathxdck Hansen has cnmpared ~tie behaxOor of the bewitched with the neurodc syndrome that psychiat~is~s refer to as %onversion hysteria." A neurosis is a disorder of beh>,ior that funcfons to avoid or deflect intolerable anxiety. Normally, an allxious person deals with an emotion through conscious action or ttmught. If the ordinaU means nf coping fail, however; the macon scious takes over. Hysterical patients w~ll convert their mental won’ies into phys- ical s3maptoms such as blindness, paralysis of various parts of the body, choking, faintly, or at*acks of pain. These symptoms, it should be stressed, catmot be la’aced m organic causes. There is nod~itxg wrong with the nervous system dur- ing an attack of paralysis, or ~xdth the optic neia~e in a case of blinduess. Physical disabilities are mentally induced. Such hysterica! attacks often occur in pa~erns that bear striking resemblance to some of the Salem afflictions. TI Pierre Janet, the French phy’sician who wrote the classic lPlc~jor of Hysteria (1907), reported that a characteristic hysterical fit begins with a pain or strange sensation in some part of O~e body, often the lower abdomen. From there, tie explained, it seems to ascend and to spread to other organs. For instance, it often spreads to d~e epigastrium [the region lying over the stomach], to the breasts, then to the throat. There it assumes rather an interesting form, which was for aveW long time considered as quite characteristic of hysteria. The patim~t has the sensa tion of too big an object as it were, a ball rising in her throat and choldng her. g 8 Most of us have probably experienced a mild form of the last symptom a proverbial "lump in the throat" that comes in times of sn’ess. The hysteric’s lump, or gqobm" @~’te*’icz~.r, is more extreme, as are the accompanying convul- sions: "the head is agitated in one direction or another, the eyes closed, or open with an expression of terror, the mouth distorted." 3~ Compare those symptoms with the oi~es experienced by Richard Comans, who (we have already seen) was struck down in bed by the weight of Bridget Bishop’s specter and so frightm~ed, "he could not speak nor star"; or the tits of another tormented accuser, Elizabeth Brown, described duriug the S~’lem hearings: When [the xvitch’s specter] did come it was as birds pecking her legs or prick- ing her with the motion of thayr wings and then it xvould rize up into her sta- mak with pricking pain as nayls and pins of which she did bitterly complayn and cry out like a women in travail and after that it would rise to her throat in a bunch like a pullets egg and then she would tern back her head and say witch you shant choak me. ?’

2. The records hint that at least one bewitchment death may have occurred, however. Daniel V~qlkins apparently believed that John YVillard was a witch and meant him no good. Willd~s sick- ened, and some of the afflicted girls were smnmoned to his bedside, where fl~ey claimed tixat the), saw Willard’s specter afflicting him. The doctor would not touch t]~e case, claiming it "preternatu- ral." Shortly after, ¼rllkins died. l~TER THE FACT: rJ]Hg ART OF HISTORICAL DE~I’ECTION

A hysterical convulsive attack of one of the patier~ts in Salpgtri~re Hospital during the nineteenth century. J. M. Charcot, the physician in charge of the clinic, spent much of his time studying the disorder. Note tfie crossed legs, similar to some of tee Salem girls’ ~ts. q~ The diagnosis of hysteria, or at least of unconscious psychological pres- sures of one sort or another, has gained ground over the past decades. Yet the issue of fraud cannot be put so easily to rest. Bernard Rosenthal, a scholar who has recen@ reexamined the Salem court records, argues that a close reading of the depositions suggests that fraud and hysteria were intermingled. Wt~at are we to ma, ke, for example, of the testimony given against Sarah Good and another a~ccused, Lydia Dustin, regarding their "tormq~ts" of one ? Susam~ah Sheldon being at the house of ~,¥i’lliam Shaw she was tied h~r hands a cross i~a such a manner we were forced to cut the string before we could git her hand loose and when shee was out of her fit she told us it~ I~as] (:~oody ¯ ..pustin tl~at di~l rye t~er laands .after tha’c maaner, and 4 times sh~ hati~ been tyed in this manner in rowe weeks dme[.] The 2 first times shee say*h it was Goode Dustin and ihe 2 last times it was Sarah Goode that did rye her. ~Ve fur der Cesdtie that when ever shee doth but touch this string shee is prese~{{!3~ bit. qi It is one matter to have "fits" througb terror but another to have wrists tied four times hy a specter who is then said to have bitten Sheldon if she tried to untie them. Unless we believe in invisible specters, the only reason- able explanation would seem to be that Susannah Sheldon had a confederate who tied her hands. Similarly Deodar Lawson, a minister who dew)ut!y be- lieved in witchcraft, reported iu March 1692 that Some of the afllicted, as they were striving in their fits in open court, have (by invisible means) had their wrists bound fast together with a real co~’d, so as it could hardly be taken off without cutting. Some afflicted have been found with their arms tied, and hanged upon an hook, from whence others have been forced to take them down~ that they might not exl~ire in tha~ posture. The conclusion, argqaed Rosenthal, must be similar: %!Vbether the ’afflicted’ worked these shows out among themselves or had help from odaers cannot be determined; but there is little doubt d~at such calculated action was de- liberately conceived to perpetuate the fraud in which the afflicted were volved, and that theories of hysteria or hallucination cannot account for people being bound, whether on the courtroo*n floor or on hooks." Such ev- idence suggests a complex set of behaviors in which both hysteria and fraud played a part. qa. As for the behavior of those acc~sed, what seems clear is the fldghtening dynamic unleashed by the magistrates’ decision to regard confession as wor thy of pardon while viewing denials of witchcraft as a sign of guilt. Indeed, the magistrates appeared not to want to take no for an answer. John Proctor complained that when his son was e~amined, "because he would not confess that he was Guilty, when he was inuocent, they tyed him Neck and Heels till the Blood gushed out at his Nose, and would have kept him so 24 Hours, if one more Merciful than the rest, had not taken pity on him." Once Bridget Bishop was executed in June, the lesson was chilling and direct. Those who confessed to witchcraft like Tituba--avoided being hanged. Those who maintained their innocence were Maded for the gallows. ~/~ Sarah Churchill, a young wo*nan of about seventeen, experienced these pressures. She apparently succumbed to her fears and testified that she was a witch. Soon, however, she had second tboughts, for she came crying and wringing her hands to an older fhiend, Sarah Ingersoll. "I asked her what she ailed?" reported Ingersoll. She answered she had undone herself. I asked her in what. She said in belying herself and offsets in sa, ying she had set her hand to the devil’s Book whereas she said she never did. I told her I believed she had set her hand to the ~)ook. She a~q~s3vered crying and said no no no, Inaver, Inaver did. I asked then {vhat had made her say she did. She answered because they threatened her and told her they would put her into the dungeon and put her along with Mr. Bur- roughs, and d~ns several times she followed [me] on up and dowu telling me that she had undone herself in belying herself and others. I asked her why she didn’t tell the truth now. She told me because she had stood out so long in it that now she durst not. She said also that if she told Mr. Noyes [an investigat- ing minister] but once that she had set her hand to the Book he would believe her, but if she told the truth and said she had not set her hand to the book a hundred times he would not believe her. qq Thus psychological terrors sprang fl’om more than one source. The frights of the invisible workl, to be sure, led many villagers to fear for their lives and souls. But the refusal of the magistrates to accept the denials of the i~mocent led to equally terrifying pressures to belie oneself in order to es- cape execution. In a cataclysm involving hundreds of people in the commu- nity, either as accused witches, horrified onlookers, or active accusers, it is perhaps not surprising that individuals behaved in a wide variety of ways.

THE VISIBLE SALEM It would be tempting, having explored the psychological dynamics of Salem, to suppose that the causes of the outbreak have been fairly well explained. There is the satisfaction of placing the symptoms of the modern hysteric side by side with those of the seventeenth-century bewitched an.d ~eeing them match, or of carelkdfy reading the trial records to distingmish likely cases of fraud from those of hysteria. Yet by narrowing our inquiW to the motivations of the possessed, we have left other important f~cets of the Salem episode unexplored. qg In the first place, the investigation thus f:ar has dealt with the controversy on an individual rather than a social level. But step back for a moment. For whatever reasons, approximately 150 people in Salem and other towns found themselves accused. V~/qly were those particular people singled out? Does any common bond explain why they, and not others, were accused? Only af- ter we have examined their social identities can we answer that question. m, Aamther indication that the social context of Salem Village needs to be ex- amined is the nature of hysteria itself. Hysterics are notably suggestib!e, that is, sensitive to the influence of their emdromnent. Scattered testimony in the records suggests that sometimes when the young women saw specters whom they could not identify, adults suggested names. "Was it Go6dy Cloyse? Was it Rebecca Nurse?" If true, such conditions confirm the need to move be- yond strictly personal motivations to the social setting of the community. q{ In doing so, a logical first step would be to look for correlations, or char- acteristics common to groups tllat might explain their behavior. Are the ac- cusers all church ’}nembers and the accused nonchurch members? Are the accusers wealthy and respectable and the accused poor and disrel~htable? The historian assembles the data, shuffles them around, and looks fox7 matchups. qs Take the two social characteristics just mentioned, church membership and wealth. Historians can compile lists from the trial recor&,of both the accusers and the accused. With those lists in hand, they can be~in checldng the cbm-ch records to discover which people on each list were church mena bers.3V)r the?, can search tax records to see whose tax rates were hig~nest and thus which villagers were wealthiest. Land transactions were recorded, indi- cating which villagers owned the most land. Inventories of personal property were made when a member of the cominnnity died, so at least historians have some record of an individual’s assets at death, if not in 1692. Other records may mentiou a trade or occupation, which will give a clue to relative wealth or social status. q’I If you made such calculations fox" the Salem region, you would quicldy find yourself at a dead end, a spot altogether too familiar to practicing his- torians. True, the first few accused witches were not church members, but soon enongh the faithfld found themselves in jail along with nonchurch members. A similar case holds for wealth. Although Timba, Sarah Good, and Sarah Osbourne were relatively poor, merchauts and wealthy farmers were accused as the epidemic spread. The correlations fail to check. 8~ This dead end was roughly the point that had been reached when t~,o his torians Paul Bovec and Stephen Nissenbaum, were inspired to take literally the adxdce about going back to the drawing board. More than a hundred years earlier Charles Upham had made a detailed map of Salem for his own study of the witcbcraft episode. Upham examined the old town records, paced the actual sites of old houses, and estabfished to the best of his knowledge the res- idences of a large majority of Salem Villagers. Boyer and Nissenbaum took their list of accx~sers and accused and noted the location of each village resl dent. The results were striking, as can be seen from the map on page 38. 8"1 Of the fourteen accused witches in the village, twelve lived in the eastern section. Of the thirtT-two adult villagers who testified against the accused, thirty lived in the western section. ~’In other words," concluded Boyer and Nissenbaum, "the alleged witches and those who accused them resided on opposite sides of the Village." Furthermore, of twemT-nlne residents who publicly defended the accused in some waD twenty-four lived in the eastern half of the village. Often they were close neighbors of the accused. It is ments like these that make the historian want to behave, were it not for the staid air of research libraries, like Archimedes leaping fl’om his fiabled bath- mb and shouting "Eureka[" ,~a The discovery is only the beginning of the task. The geographic chart suggests a division, but it does not at all indicate what that division is, other than a general east-west split. So Boyer and Nissenbanm began to explore the history of the village itself, expanding their microcosm of 1692 backward in time. They investigated a social situation that historians had long recog- nized but had never associated with the : Salem Village’s uneasy relation to its social parent, Salem Town. 6.? Salem "Ibwn’s settlerrjent followed the pattern of most coastal New En- gland towns. Original s’ettlers set up houses around a central location and earved.tl~eir farmlands out of the surrounding countryside. As a se~ement prosperd~t, the land in its immediate vicinity came to be completely taken up. As houses were erected farther and farther away from the central ~neeting 3 8 AFTER FI IE FACT: ~-IE ~P,T OF HIs’rORICAL DETECTION

"Tile Geography of Witchcraft" (afi:er Boyer and Nissenbaum, Sale~*’~ Possess~’d, Harvard University Press, 1974)

house, outlying residents fout~d it inconvenient to come to church or attend to other civic duties. In such cases, they sought recognition as a separate vil- lagu, with their own church, their own taxes, and their own elected officials. _5-’/ Here the trouble started. The settlers who lived toward the center of town were reluctant m let their outlying neighbors break away. Everyone paid taxes to support a minister for the town church, to maintain the roads, and tO care for the poor. If a chunk of the village split off, revenue would be lost. Fnrthermore, outlying settlers would no longer share the common bur dens, such as guarding the town at night. So O~e centrally located settlers usually resisted any movement for autonomy by their more distant neigh- bors. Such disputes were a regular feature of New England life. 55 Salem ~lbwn had followed this pattern. Its first settlers located on a penin- sula extending into Massachusetts Bay, where they pursued a prosperous colonial trade. By 1668 four outlying areas had already become separate towns. Now the "Salem Farmers," living directly to the west, were petition- ing for a similar settlement, and the "Townsmen" were resisting. In 1672 Massachusetts’s legisl’~ture allowed Salem Village to build its ow~ meeting honse~*.but in other matters, the village remained dependent. Salem Town still collected village taxes chose village constables and arrang~0 for xdllage l~a.~. The colonys records ~nclude pent,on after pennon friSin v~llagers co,@laining about tax rates, patrol dudes, boundaW rulings. "Salem i~, 1692" (From Tt~e Pztrs-~dt qf Ll’be~3,: A Hi;to~y qf the A~nerb:a~ People, vol. I, by R. Jaclc~on ~’~ison, et al. Cop)q’ight 1966 by HarperCotlins College Publishen~. Reprinted by permissio~ of Addison-Wesley Educational Publishers Inc.)

5~ l-lere, then, is one east west split bem~een the village and the town. But the line drawn on Boyer and Nissenbaum’s *nap is ~vithi~ the village, l/Vhat cause would the village have for division? ~5? Many causes, the records indicate--chief among them the choice of a minister. YVhen the village built its own meeting house, it chose James Bay- Iey to be its pastor in 1673. Soon enough, however, some churchgoers be~ gan complaining. Bayley didn’t attend regularly to his private prayers. Church members had not been fully consulted before his selection. After a flurW of petitions and coouterpetitions, Bayley left in 1680, and George Burroughs was hired. Three years later Burroughs left in another dispute. He was succeeded by Deodar Lawson, who lasted through fuur more years of quarrels. Finally Samuel Parris occupied the pulpit after !688. His term was equally storn~y, arid in 1696 his opponents finally succeeded in starving him out of the job by refusing to coliect taxes to pay his salary. 5-~ @he.maaneuverings that went on during the years of bickering seem be- wilderingly complex. But Boyer and Nissenbaum recognized that the church records, as well as the petitions and counterpetitions, provided a key to io~ cal divisions. When the lists from the different quarrels were compared, Buyer and Nissenbaum found that the same names were being grouped to- gether. The people who supported James Bayley usually supported George Burroughs and then opposed the second two ministers. Conversel); the sup- porters of Deodar Lawson and Samuel Parris had been the peopte who com- plained about Bayley and Burroughs. And--here is the iink~t~e two lists fi’om those disputes coincide closely with the divisions in 1692 between ac- cusers and accused. g~ Suddenly the Salem witch trials take on an entirely new appearance. In- stead of being a dramatic disruption that appears out of nowhere in a village kitchen and then disappears equally suddenly at the end of ten months, it comes an elaboration of a quarrel that has gone on fur nearly twenty years! ¢~ lkq~at lay behind the divisions? One reading of clae evidence suggests that tl~e larger split bet~veen Salem Town and Salem Vi!lage was reflected in the village itself, s~dth the villagers on the east retaining enough iu common with the town to continue their af~liation and the westerners favoring complete separation. Buyer and Nissenbaum argtm that the division also went beyond the simple geographical one to a difference in outlook and lifestyle. Saiem Town was enteriug into its own as one of the major commercial centers of New England. It boasted a growing merchant class whose wealth would soon support the building of line mansions. By coutrast, the t:armers in the western portion of Salem Vi!lage were tied more closely to traditional agrar- ian life: subsistence farming, spartan daily lives, a suspicion of the commer- cia! habits of offering credit and making speculative investments. ~,7~Torse, the Salem farmers found themselves increasingly hard-pressed. The land avail- able in the village was dwindling. What land there was proved less fertile than the hroad plains on the eastern side of the village and along ~e north- ern flats of Salem ’Pown. ’~l Look, too, at the occupatious of the accused witches and their defenders. Many lived along the Ipswich Road, a route that passed by the village rather than through it, a main thoroughfare for travelers and for commerce. The tradespeople who had set up shop therd incIuded a carpenter, sawmili oper- ator, shoemaker, and miller, And of course there were the taverns, mainstayg of tl’avelers, yet aN~ays slightly suspect to Puritans. The people along the Ipswich Road were not rich, most of them, hut their commercial links were with Salem Town and with outsiders. They were small-scale entrepreneurs rather than farmers. Out of twenty-one villagers who lived along or r~ear the road, only two signed petitions linking them with the western faction; thir- teen signed petitions linking them with the eastern faction. Tavern keeper John Proctor was hanged as a witch; his wife Elizabeth barely escaped with her life; and Joshua Rein, another tavern keeper on the road, signed a peti- t.ion defending Good?/Nurse. g’a Boyeji and Nissenbaum’s reconstruction of village factions thus ~uggests an alternate way of looking at the Salem trials. T{’aditional accounts place .Sgmuel Parris and his supporters as leaders of the village, te~’~6rizing inno- ~&t’~: x/,llagers and controllh~g the trials. Certainly Parris~s supporters had their day in 1692, but from the longer perspective they appear to have been fighting a losing battle, qff Boyer and Nissenbaum are correct, the. ~alem tri- als ~t’re an indirect yet anguished protest of a group of villagers whose agratian way of ti[~ was being threatened by d~e rising commercialism of Salem Town. {,3 The brilliance of Boyer alld Nissenbaum’s’ research was to place the indi- vidual dramas of Salem into a larger social context. But their maps are not tt~e only maps that cau be drawn, nor their connections the only connections to be made. Boyer and Nisseubaum I:ocused their attencio~ o*,, Salem lage. But as the witchcraft trials gained momentum, tbe fryer spread to a few neighboring villages. In the summer of 1692, several of the possessed women of Salem were invited to Andover by concerned residents. The re- suiting rmmd of accusations led to the arrest of nearly forty Ba~dover vil- lagers. A month latex’, a smaller outbreak centered in the fishing port of Gloucester, where six people were arrested. Several more of the accused from Salem had Gloucester ties. All these people were tried by the same court that dealt with the Salem cases. Taking these additioual episodes into account makes it more difficult to generalize about embattled farmers arrayed against a rising commercialism. Gloucester was a fishit~g port, while Andover, though it was )ust as ag~’ariau as Salem \~[lage, had rto commercial "parent" the likes of Salem Town. But if rising conanaercialism was not the only, or primal35 social factor iufluenc- ing the Salem outbreak, what then? Several historians, most recently iVia~Tg Beth Nos’ton, have explored the connections bee~veen the trials and New E*~gland’s Indian wars. Memories of King Philip’s VCar of 1676 fingered in the region for many years, leaving in- habitants anxious and uneasy, especially along the frontiel; Theu came a new outbreak of violence in 1689, which the settlers referred to as "r.he secoud Indian war." In JanuaU 1692, just as the witchcraft controversy was getting started~ word came from York, Maine, that Indians had massacred residents ¯ere. Indeed, a number of the accusers at the Salem trials experienced first- hand the horrors of the conflict. --one of the principal accus- ers-only two }mars earlier had seen her mother, father, sister, and brother murdered in an Indian attack. Analyzing the chronoloD! of the trials, Norton pointed out that the nmn- bet of witchcraft accusations rose sharply only in April 1692. It was at this point that Abigail I-tobbs was brought before tbe magistrates because of her reputation for being flippant about the spreading crisis. (She was "not afraid of auything," she supposedly boasted, because she had "Sold her selfe boddy & Soull to the old boy"--that is, to Satan.) During the late 1680s Hobbs had lived for some time along the Maine frontier. Under hostile questioning from the magistrates, she admitted that she had covenanted there with the devil--while "at Casko-bay." Having thus confessed, she quickly turned into an enthusiastic prosecution witness. Before her confession on April 17 only ten people had been dbarged with witchcraft. In the seven weeks(that fol- lowed, tire total jumped to sixty-eight. The spectral visions of Abigat! Hobbs and M&cy Lewis led to the indictment of a number of folk from Maine, 42 AJFTER THE FACT: TIlE !~RT OF HIS FORICAL DETECTION

chief among them the Reverend George Burroughs, who seemed the ring- leader of the devilish conspiracy, in the eyes of many. The anxieties spawned by the frontier attacks, argued Norton, were what pushed the Salem hyste- ria bq~ond the bounds of the usual witchcraft trials of seventeenth

buy or sell property. Even when remarrying, a widow could sometimes pro- tect her holdings by having her new husband sign a prenuptial contract, guaranteeing before marriage that the wife would keep certain property as her own. In male-dmninated New England, these protections made the f#.¢e sole stand out as an anomaly--a woman alone who did not fit comfortably into the ordinatT scheme of things. :~,( Given that women in Puritan society were ge~erally placed in subordit~ate roles, how does that fact help explain the preponderance of female witches? As it turns out, a significant number of accused witches were women who were not subordinate in some way. In refusing to conform to accepted stereotypes, they threatened the traditional order of society and were more likely to be accused of subverting it as witches. ?~, A woman might stand out, for example, through a contentious, argumen- tative nature. If a wot~?~n’s duty was to submit quietly to the rule of men and to glory in "subjectior~," then quite a few witches refused to confom~ to the aceeptgd role. ~g!e have already seen how Sarah Good’s "muttering and scolding extreamly" were perceived by Salem Villagers to have caused the death of cattle. Trial records are filled with similar accusations. "1} Often, more than short tenapers were at stake. A remarkably high per- cent, age of accused women werefemes sole in an economic sensd?Of the 124 wi{~l~Zes whose inheritance patterns can be reconstructed frmn surviving records, as many as 71 (57 percent) lived or had lived in families~with no male~l~eirs. Aoother 14 accused witches were the daughters or granddai~gh- ters of witches who did not have brothers or sons to inherit their propertT, This figure is at least twice the number that would be expected, given the usual percentage ofii’~es.role in the New England population. Furthermore, of the women executed at Salem, more than half had inherited or stood to inherit their 6wn property. Such statistics suggest why witchcraft controver- sies so often centered Oll women.

TANGLED WEBS The early modern world, including that of colonial New England, was un certain, mapredictable, full of dnmce. Livestock, on which farm families de- pended, might die suddenly. The primitive knowledge of physicians proved all but useless in curing the ills of the poor and wealthy alike. Amidst so many unpredictable tragedies, witchcraft offered an explanatiou.for misfortunes that o~e*wise might have seemed inexplicable. Witchcraft made the unpre- 8ictable predictable and the obscure sometimes all too terrifyingly clear. ~ Unlike diviners or witch doctors, historians have followed the example of the natural sciences in seeking testable, rational links between cause and ef- fect. Yet the longing fur a simple, coherent story remair~s sn’ong. FVe all wish to see the confusing welter of events lock together with a clarity that leads us, like Archimedes, to cry Eureka--conversion hysteria! Or Eureka--the t~ressures of the new commercial economy! Or Eureka--fgr, ves sole/ ?~ Instead, the discipline of small-scale, local history forces humility. As his- torians sift the web of relationships surrounding the Salem outbreak, most have come to believe that its causes are multiple rather than singular. "Irre- ducible to any single source of social strain," concludes Christine Heyrman. No single "governing explanation," argues Bernard Rosenthal, The vely fact that witchcraft outbreak did not recur elsewhere in New EugIand suggests that the magnitude of Salem’s calamity depended on an unusua! combination of psychological and social [:actors. ,% Certainly, an agrarian faction in the village did not consciously devise the trials to punish dxeir commercial rivals or Quake>loving neighbors. Nor was the male Puritan patriarchy launching a deliberate war against women. But the invisible world of witchcraft did provide a framework that amplified village anxieties and focused them. As the accusations of a small circle of young women widened and as controversy engulfed the town, it was only natural that long-standing quarrels and prejudices were drawn into the de- bate. The interconneetions between a people’s rdigious beliefs, their habits of commerce, even tl~eir dream and 5antasy lives, are intricate and fine, en- twined with one another like the delicate root system of a gro~ng plant. Hisf6r}ans who limit their examination to a small area of time and space are able, througb persistent probing, to untangle the strands of emotions, moti- vations, and social structures that provided the context for those slow pro- cessions to the gallows on Witch’s Hilh