Escaping Salem: The Other Witch Hunt of 1692 (17 page)

Popular beliefs and accusations were also based on a good deal more than fantasy or the unquestioning acceptance of far-fetched tales. People questioned closely neighbors who claimed to be bewitched; their assumptions and conclusions were based on what they perceived as actual experience. At every stage of the Stamford witch hunt, neighbors and officials were eager to test Kate’s claims through careful observation and experimentation. I have sought to show on the one hand how cautious most of those involved were as they sought to confirm or refute suspicions of witchcraft through the scrupulous collection of evidence, while retaining on the other hand a sense of their belief in the reality of malign occult forces and their fear at the prospect of having to confront them. The assumptions from which these New Englanders proceeded and the specific techniques that they used may strike us as bizarre, yet they were clearly committed to a process of empirical verification that we might perhaps characterize as scientific supernaturalism.

At stake were human lives—those of the accused and their accusers—which brings me to my other motive for writing this book. I wanted to tell a story that I find gripping and moving, a story that surely deserves to be told; and I wanted to bring to life for readers the world in which it took place. Most academic studies of New England witchcraft assume the “objective” voice of the historian who looks back on events and analyzes them. This book seeks to recreate the world in which the people of Stamford and Compo lived by giving them voice, avoiding the deliberate self-distancing inherent in most scholarly analysis. I wanted to get as close as possible to their lives, their points of view, and their fears. I was aided in that task by the trial depositions, which are
narrative-driven
and
perspective-driven
in their format. What I mean by that is that witnesses told stories about personal experiences that seemed significant to them, often in vivid detail, and along the way made clear their interpretation of the incidents in question. What emerges is a constellation of narratives, each with its own context, perspective, and motivation.

The way in which we choose to tell a story is, of course, influenced by our own point of view—and that applies to historians as well as those who speak to us through surviving documents. My retelling of this particular story has been shaped by my own interpretive stance as a scholar of New England witchcraft and also by my reading of books and articles written by other historians. Recent scholars have used the transcripts from witch trials as a window into the lives and attitudes of ordinary colonists whose voices are otherwise lost to us. These scholars have reconstructed the supernatural beliefs that influenced townsfolk as they began to suspect that one of their neighbors was a witch and the local tensions that found expression in the form of witch accusations. Their findings and interpretations have informed my choices as a storyteller. The scholarship that undergirds this narrative remains for the most part implicit throughout the main body of the book: the story itself and its characters occupy center stage. But now the time has come to lay out much more explicitly the approaches and interpretations that have guided my account of how the residents of Stamford and Compo reacted to a young woman who claimed she was bewitched.

As historian Keith Thomas pointed out in his classic study of English witch beliefs,
Religion and the Decline of Magic
, the anxieties that led to witch accusations “reflected the hazards of an intensely insecure environment.”
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We are raised to believe that modern technologies enable us to control our environment and solve our medical problems. Such confidence is not without foundation: when it gets dark, we turn on electric lights and so banish the darkness; when we fall ill, medicinal and surgical therapies can often either cure us or at least control our symptoms. Seventeenth-century men and women did not enjoy that same degree of control or confidence. Medical experts were, as Thomas points out, “quite unable to diagnose or treat most contemporary illnesses."
⁷
In general, much that we claim to understand was for the members of premodern society incomprehensible and uncontrollable—save in supernatural terms.

Seventeenth-century New Englanders believed that their world was filled with supernatural forces that could bring about physical effects. When Abraham Finch thought he saw a ball of fire pass through Katherine Branch’s room and believed Kate’s explanation that a woman with “fiery eyes” had come into the room, when Edward Jesop could not push a canoe into the creek and suspected that Mercy Disborough had bewitched it, and when Goodwife Newman concluded that the sudden death of three sheep was due to witchcraft, their reactions would not have struck contemporaries as peculiar. For all the Puritans’ determination to break with the “superstitions” of the past, especially those associated with the Catholic Church, they were just as convinced as other English folk on both sides of the Atlantic that the universe was an enchanted place. New England colonists, writes historian David D. Hall, “remained Elizabethans” and inhabited “a world of wonders.”
⁸
 The supernatural realm, they believed, could intrude upon their lives at any time. Any extraordinary event that seemed to interrupt the natural order—comets and eclipses, dramatic fires and epidemics, deformed births and inexplicable crop failures, dreams and visions—carried supernatural significance. Some were sent by God, others by Satan.

According to the world view embraced by most New Englanders, God and the Devil were constantly at work in their day-to-day lives, testing and tempting, rewarding and punishing as each son and daughter of Adam and Eve deserved. God had ultimate authority over all that occurred in the universe, so that when the Devil intervened in people’s lives, he was able to do so because God allowed it to happen. Ministers argued that any misfortune or mishap carried a divine message: usually God wasprompting sinners to self-examination, repentance, and a renewed commitment to obey God’s commandments. On some occasions God inflicted the warning himself; on others he allowed the Devil or even a human witch to act on his behalf. In either case, ministers insisted that the appropriate response was to repent and reform. When Puritan tailor John Dane was stung by an insect and his arm became badly swollen, he accordingly “prayed earnestly to God that He would pardon my sin and heal my arm.” Dane also sought a medical prognosis from a devout physician, who declared his condition to be “the take.” When the young man asked him what that meant, he replied, “it was taken by the providence of God.” According to the doctor, John Dane was being punished for his sins and must mend his ways in order for the affliction to be removed.
⁹

Yet godly New Englanders looked outward as well as inward for the source of their afflictions. When girls and young women in Salem Village began to suffer strange fits, the minister Samuel Parris at first prescribed prayer and fasting; he also consulted a physician. But once both men became convinced that witchcraft was causing the torments, Samuel Parris encouraged the afflicted to name their tormentors so that they could be brought to justice. There was nothing unorthodox about such a strategy: as the Bible declared, “Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live.” Scripture taught that witches were real and that they should be hunted down for punishment. Yet biblical mandate and resentment of the damage inflicted by witches were not the only reasons why colonists reacted to afflictions by lashing out against those apparently responsible for their adversities.

Alongside Protestant Christianity there survived and flourished in New England less formal and yet influential folk beliefs that the settlers brought from England, including those that underlay the use of magic. Folk magic was based on the assumption that men and women could wield supernatural power for their own benefit. Many settlers believed that through the use of simple techniques, passed down from one generation to the next, they could harness occult forces so as to achieve greater knowledge and control over their lives. Experts in these techniques—often called “cunning folk”—told fortunes, claimed to heal the sick, and offered protection against witchcraft. But cunning folk could also use their skills for malevolent ends: to harm or destroy those who crossed them. Neighbors who possessed occult powers were thus valuable allies, but also potentially deadly enemies.

Most divining, healing, and defensive techniques were quite straightforward and so it was not unusual for colonists to experiment on their own. But New Englanders did often turn to experts in times of need, hoping that cunning folk could help them to see into the future, heal their ailments, or defend them against supernatural attack and strike back at their enemies. Mary Sibley, aunt of one of the afflicted children in Salem Village, asked the minister’s Caribbean slave, Tituba, to bake a urine-cake that would identify the witch responsible for afflicting her niece; Tituba had a reputation for magical cunning and claimed that “her mistress in her own country...had taught her some means to be used for the discovery of a witch.”
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Transcripts from the Connecticut trials of 1692 make no reference to magical divination in Stamford or Compo, but Mercy Disborough’s neighbors did use defensive magic to identify who was bewitching them and to inflict revenge. When Henry Grey’s cow seemed strangely afflicted, he cut off part of the cow’s ear and gave the animal a thrashing. The next day, Goody Disborough was confined to her bed with aches and pains. Goodman Grey concluded that this was a case of cause and effect: the injuries had been translated back onto Mercy Disborough as the afflicting witch. She was clearly to blame. He then described his experiment to the court as incriminating evidence.

New Englanders such as Henry Grey did not see anything wrong with using magic to defend themselves or to punish the wicked; only those who deployed their skills for malign ends were a social menace. From this perspective, witchcraft was the misuse of otherwise benign supernatural skills. But ministers saw things differently. They were horrified by the popularity of magical techniques, especially among devout settlers. They insisted that scripture gave no sanction for such experiments and that human beings could not wield supernatural forces. The Puritan clergy did not doubt that magic worked, but according to them it did so because the Devil intervened to assist whoever used it. Individuals might think that they were successfully harnessing occult powers, but in fact the Devil was doing it for them and so luring them into his service. Ministers denounced the use of magic to identify witches as “going to the Devil to find the Devil.” All such experiments, regardless of whether the goal was benign or malevolent, were diabolical, their practitioners “beguiled by the serpent that lies in the grass unseen.”
¹¹

Yet, in general, colonists who turned to magic do not seem to have given much thought to where such powers came from. Ministers were deeply concerned with issues of causation and some of their congregants shared that concern, but other New Englanders were more concerned with results. Their attitude was pragmatic: tradition taught that such forces existed and that they could be useful. Some settlers may not have understood why magic was objectionable from a theological perspective; others may have understood quite well their ministers’ objections, but quietly ignored official warnings or set aside their own misgivings for the simple reason that magic answered certain needs for knowledge and control that Puritan theology reserved only for God. When godly colonists turned to magic, they were not rejecting their religious faith so much as turning to whatever supernatural resource seemed helpful at a given moment. Mary Sibley, the Salem Village church member who asked Tituba to bake a urine-cake, was probably also praying to God for the child’s deliverance from affliction. She may well have felt that her niece needed all the help she could get.

The belief that magic could be used for both good and evil purposes placed people like Tituba, known for their magical cunning, in an ambiguous and potentially perilous position. When New Englanders feared that they were bewitched, they often blamed men and women in their local communities who already had a reputation for occult skill: such individuals might be using their skills to harm as well as to help their neighbors. Tituba was one of the first to be accused in Salem Village. Healers could easily become the target of suspicion if their patients grew sicker instead of recovering. And anyone known for their magical expertise had reason to worry if they argued with a neighbor who then suffered a mysterious illness or mishap. Neighbors might conclude that they, their loved ones, or their possessions were bewitched. If they thought they had sufficient evidence to justify their claims in a court of law, the target of suspicion could well find herself on trial for her life.

Women known for their magical skills were much more likely than men to be accused of witchcraft. The power wielded by cunning folk was potentially dangerous whether in the hands of a man or a woman, but it seemed especially threatening if possessed by a woman because it contradicted gender norms that placed women in subordinate positions. Neither belief in folk magic nor its practice were specific to women: men also resorted to and functioned as cunning folk. Yet suspicions that magical skill had been used for malicious ends were much more likely to be directed against female practitioners. Their prosecution testified not only to the ambiguous place that cunning folk occupied within New England communities but also to fear and suspicion of women in particular.

Witchcraft was perceived on both sides of the Atlantic as a primarily female phenomenon. Around four-fifths of those New Englanders tried for witchcraft were women. Roughly half of the men charged with this crime were married or otherwise close to accused women: they were, in other words, guilty by association.
¹²
Puritan ministers did not teach that women were by nature more evil than men, but they did see them as weaker and thus more susceptible to sinful impulses. Historian Elizabeth Reis has pointed out that “colonists shared with their English brethren the belief that women’s bodies were physically weaker than men’s” and that therefore “the Devil could more frequently and successfully gain access to and possess women’s souls.”
¹³ 
Ministers reminded New England congregations that it was Eve who first gave way to Satan and then seduced Adam, when she should have continued to serve his moral welfare in obedience to God; all women inherited that insidious blend of weakness and power from their mother Eve. Yet some women were much more likely to be accused of witchcraft than others. Throughout the seventeenth century, women became vulnerable to such allegations only if they were seen as having forsaken their prescribed place in a gendered hierarchy that Puritans held to be ordained by God.