Escaping Salem: The Other Witch Hunt of 1692 (18 page)

Indeed, women who fulfilled their allotted roles as wives, mothers, household mistresses, and church members were respected and praised by their godly brethren as Handmaidens of the Lord. Puritan ministers insisted that women were not “a necessary evil” but instead “a necessary good,” designed as a “sweet and intimate companion: for men.
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That benign view of womankind contrasted sharply with entrenched stereotypes of women as morally untrustworthy. It was driven by an emphasis within the Protestant movement on the family as a primary agent of spiritual growth and social order. Like other English folk, Puritans worried about the disorder and godless behavior pervading their society. But, whereas most of their contemporaries favored the strengthening of civil and ecclesiastical authority to meet this challenge, Puritans advocated a more fundamental shift from external to internal discipline. Individuals, they proclaimed, should be trained to control themselves at an early age. This could be accomplished most effectively within the family household, as parents lovingly but firmly crushed the willful impulses of their children and taught them self-discipline.

That enterprise required a close and mutually supportive alliance between husband and wife. Though the husband as patriarch would have ultimate authority within the household, his wife must play a crucial role as “helpmeet” to him if their family was to fulfill its ordained purpose in fostering pious and well-ordered behavior. As historian Carol Karlsen has pointed out, Puritan thinkers needed to believe that women could play a constructive role within a godly commonwealth, not because they valued women in their own right but because they needed companions and helpmeets in the endeavor of raising self-disciplined and godly children. “There was no place in this vision,” Karlsen writes, “for the belief that women were incapable of fulfilling such a role. Nor was there a place in the ideal Puritan society for women who refused to fill it.”
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That caveat in Puritan gender ideology could prove fatal. Women whose circumstances or behavior seemed to disrupt social norms and hierarchies could easily lose their status as Handmaidens of the Lord and become branded as the Servants of Satan. Especially vulnerable were women who had passed menopause and thus no longer served the purpose of procre-ation, women who were widowed and so neither fulfilled the role of wife nor had a husband to protect them from malicious accusations, and women who had inherited or stood to inherit property in violation of expectations that wealth would be transmitted from man to man. Women who seemed unduly aggres-sive and contentious or who failed to display deference toward men in positions of authority—women, in other words, like Elizabeth Clawson and Mercy Disborough—were also more likely to be accused. Both Clawson and Disborough had husbands who were still alive, but they did fit the age profile of most accused witches: Goody Clawson was sixty-one and Goody Disborough was fifty-two. Both were also confident and determined, ready to express their opinions and to stand their ground when crossed. Such conduct seemed to many New Englanders utterly inappropriate in women.

The Protestant Reformation in general and Puritan culture in particular created an ambiguity in women’s status that seems to have fostered anxiety about independent-minded women. The Protestant belief in a “priesthood of all believers,” rejecting the Catholic emphasis on intercession by male priests, made women as well as men fully responsible for their own souls as they sought forgiveness for their sinfulness through direct engagement with God. Historian Christina Larner has suggested that the increase in witch accusations during the Reformation period may have functioned “as a rearguard action against the emergence of women as independent adults.” After all, she notes, witchcraft “was only possible for women who had free will and responsibility attributed to them."
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Even as they stressed the important roles played by wives and mothers within the family household, Protestants reaffirmed pa-triarchal order. New Englanders sought to ensure a positive and respected place for women in godly society, yet lingering fear of “women-as-witches” complicated and compromised their cele-bration of women as “a necessary good.” Behavior or circumstances that seemed disorderly could easily become identified as diabolical and associated with witchcraft: the Devil had, after all, led a rebellion against God’s rule in heaven. Eve’s legacy as a female prototype was double-edged: one the one hand, a beloved and successful helpmeet in the Garden of Eden; on the other, Satan’s first human ally. Though worthy of honor as Adam’s companion prior to their fall from grace, Eve’s disobedience to God at the Devil’s bidding made her the first witch.
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And what of Katherine Branch? Kate claimed at one point during her ordeal that the Devil had tried to recruit her as a witch. Once she became the center of attention in the household where she worked and indeed throughout Stamford, Kate assumed a prominence that was altogether anomalous for a young woman in New England society. She was also the object of much distrust. Given that witches were often described as eager to en-list new recruits, using physical pain and threats of various kinds as incentives to cooperate, there was a fine line between being assaulted by witches and becoming a witch suspect. Yet Kate herself was not accused of witchcraft. One of the afflicted girls in Salem did end up being accused, but most of the children and young women in seventeenth-century New England who claimed to be attacked by witches or possessed by the Devil managed to avoid such a fate. Those who appeared to be under assault by malign supernatural forces were generally treated as victims who deserved sympathy, even though their situation and behavior during those attacks often violated social norms; those who seemed to voluntarily to embody evil were quite another matter.
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When seventeenth-century New Englanders suspected that they were bewitched, whether by a woman or a man, the person they blamed was usually a close neighbor with whom they had a history of personal tension or conflict. Accuser and accused mostly lived within the same cluster of houses, often next-door or just across the street. In most cases the antagonism developed according to one of two scenarios. In some instances the accused witch had requested a loan or gift, perhaps of food or a household implement; the neighbor refused, which gave rise to anger and resentment. In others, an exchange of goods went awry as one neighbor accused another of deception or dishonesty. In the weeks, months, and even years that followed, the person who had turned down a neighbor’s request for help or accused a neighbor of deceit blamed that same individual for later misfortunes. Abigail Wescot and Elizabeth Clawson had quarreled over the weight of some flax that Goody Clawson had provided; Henry Grey had accused Mercy Disborough’s mother of lying about the weight of some apples and then accused Mercy herself of selling him a kettle that was supposedly new and yet turned out to be old and battered. Both Elizabeth Clawson and Mercy Disborough were infuriated by these claims. The assumption underlying most accusations of witchcraft was that a person who clearly felt mistreated turned to witchcraft as a form of revenge: the victim of witchcraft had failed to be a good neighbor, whether through lack of generosity or by questioning a neighbor’s honesty, and so the alleged witch retaliated by becoming the ultimately nightmarish neighbor, wreaking havoc and destruction within her enemy’s household.

Accusations of witchcraft were hardly a constant occurrence in early New England, yet many communities did have residents who were suspected of witchcraft. On over sixty occasions during the seventeenth century, excluding the witch hunt at Salem, such suspicions turned into formal charges of witchcraft. Most of these allegations originated in disputes between neighbors. This happened not because New Englanders were exceptionally vengeful or vicious, but because of an intersection between their social values and their supernatural beliefs. That social element, so crucial in witch accusations, was closely linked to the circumstances in which most premodern men and women lived.

Historian John Demos reminds us in his book
Entertaining Satan
that most New Englanders lived in tiny communities where the quality of life was "personal in the fullest sense."
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Each resident not only knew everyone else in the town but also interacted with neighbors in many different roles and contexts. Most of us live in large towns or cities with populations in the tens of thousands and upward. Many of us have not met all the neighbors on our street or in our apartment complex, let alone those who live in other parts of the town or city. Different people fulfill distinct and isolated functions in our lives: when we go to the bank, a government office, or a shopping mall, the chances are that the official, cashier, or salesperson with whom we deal will be a stranger; even if we have dealt with the person before, it is unlikely that we know him or her in any other capacity. The experience of a New England settler could not have been more different. Demos invites us to envisage the following likely scenario: 

The brickmaker who rebuilds your chimney is also the constable who brings you a summons to court, an occupant of the next bench in the meetinghouse, the owner of a share adjacent to one of yours in the “upland” meadow, a rival for water-rights to the stream that flows behind that meadow, a fellow-member of the local “train band” (i.e., militia), an occasional companion at the local “ordinary” (i.e., tavern), a creditor (from services performed for you the previous summer but not as yet paid for), a potential customer for wool from the sheep you have begun to raise, the father of a child who is currently a bond-servant in your house, a colleague on a town committee to repair and improve the public roadways...And so on. Do the two of you enjoy your shared experiences? Not necessarily. Do you know each other well? Most certainly.
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Personal interactions and influence were central to the experience of early New Englanders. It therefore made good sense to account for misfortune or suffering in personal terms (just as it should not surprise us that modern Americans inhabiting an often anonymous world, seemingly captive to faceless institutions, should sometimes blame impersonal forces like “the federal government” for their problems). Witchcraft explained personal problems in terms of personal interactions. A particular neighbor had quarreled with you and was now taking revenge for a perceived injury by bewitching you.

The tiny communities in which New Englanders settled were clustered precariously on the margins of empire, separated from each other by roads that were sometimes impassable and by no means always safe. Neighbors knew that they depended on each other for their survival. Townsfolk and villagers helped each other to put up new buildings or harvest crops; they exchanged food and simple products such as candles or soap in a local barter economy; and they gave each other emotional support as they navigated life’s challenges and tragedies. The Puritan faith in which most of the colonists believed (albeit to varying degrees) taught that being a good neighbor had its spiritual as well as practical dimensions. Settlers must keep watch over each other, warn each other when they seemed to be in danger of giving way to sinful urges, and trust that others would keep an equally close eye on them.

John Winthrop, the first governor of Massachusetts, captured that spirit of mutual reliance in his famous lay sermon, “A Model of Christian Charity,” delivered on board the Arbella in 1630 as the colonists approached Massachusetts Bay:

We must be knit together in this work as one man. We must entertain each other in brotherly affection, we must be willing to abridge ourselves of our superfluities for the supply of others’ necessities. We must uphold a familiar commerce together in all meekness, gentleness, patience, and liberality. We must delight in each other, make others’ conditions our own, rejoice together, mourn together, labor and suffer together, always having before our eyes our commission and community in the work, our community as members of the same body. So shall we keep the unity of the spirit in the bond of peace.

These were stirring words, but easier to follow in theory than in practice. The Puritans’ emphasis on community and mutual support meant that arguments between neighbors became not only irritating in their own right but also a betrayal of larger values on which their spiritual and practical welfare depended. It is, then, hardly surprising that such disputes gave rise to festering resentments.

In many instances there was no institutional outlet for the tensions and hostilities that resulted. If someone trespassed on a neighbor’s property or assaulted another town resident, a law had been broken and the malefactor would be dealt with accordingly. But refusing to lend a neighbor food or a tool was not a crime and so the resulting animosity could not be expressed or mediated directly through civil or criminal proceedings. Witchcraft allegations provided an outlet for feelings of guilt or hostility rooted in confrontations between neighbors over issues of mutual support and responsibility. In one sense accusations of witchcraft performed a positive function in that they enabled men and women to express such feelings. Yet the atmosphere of suspicion, accusation, and recrimination that accompanied a trial could shred the social fabric; hostilities could linger for many years after the trial had run its course.

In England and Europe, historians have argued, conflicts between neighbors became particularly acute during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The emergence of a market economy and increasing social mobility chipped away at time-honored values that centered on a local community’s responsibility to care for its own; at the same time economic transformation swelled the ranks of the poverty-stricken who needed support from their neighbors. In time, new institutions like the workhouse would emerge to care for the needy, but meanwhile witchcraft accusations served as a double-edged response to unwelcome requests from neighbors in need. They defended traditional values by acknowledging that unneighborly behavior had negative consequences and yet legitimized new, less communitarian values by shifting attention away from the original unneighborly act to re-focus on the anger of those who made unwelcome demands on their neighbors.
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