Escaping Salem: The Other Witch Hunt of 1692 (19 page)

The religious ideology to which New Englanders were exposed in sermons and other official pronouncements reaffirmed traditional values of neighborly support, yet the colonists themselves had left behind the communities in which they were raised and had to rely on a transatlantic commercial network for goods that they could not produce themselves. As they sought to reconstruct a sense of community in North America, sometimes settling in groups of families from the same town or county in England, they placed themselves under great pressure to abide by ideals that were perhaps unrealistic and that sometimes conflicted with other impulses. Under such circumstances tension and conflict became weighed down with guilt and resentment.
²²

Although most accusations of witchcraft originated in tensions between close neighbors, we should beware of concluding that New Englanders used such allegations as a cynical ploy to get rid of their enemies. Most of those who accused their neighbors of witchcraft believed quite sincerely that they were guilty as charged. Given the density of interpersonal contact in these tiny communities, it is hardly surprising that one neighbor’s suspicions about another often spread from household to household in a ripple effect that encouraged other townsfolk to interpret their own misfortunes as the result of witchcraft. Allegations of witchcraft brought together three important components of premodern culture: the inability to explain or control illness and other forms of misfortune, a deeply em-bedded belief in supernatural forces that could be used to inflict harm, and the densely personal nature of human interactions. The mysterious and the supernatural converged with what John Demos refers to as “things most tangible and personal.” Along “the seam of their convergence” emerged accusations of witchcraft.
²³

Once New Englanders became convinced that a particular individual had bewitched them, they had the right to lodge a formal complaint and so initiate a criminal prosecution. In England and its New England colonies, allegations of witchcraft were handled by secular courts, not the ecclesiastical courts of inquisition that conducted witch trials in some European countries. The wording of New England’s laws against witchcraft was inspired by religious doctrine and the penalty of death was justified by reference to scripture. But the trial process itself was in the hands of secular officials.

New England’s legal system was rigorous and cautious in its handling of capital cases. Convincing oneself and one’s neighbors of an individual’s guilt was not the same as convincing a court. Of the sixty-one known prosecutions for witchcraft in seventeenth-century New England, excluding the Salem witch hunt, sixteen at most (perhaps only fourteen) resulted in conviction and execution, a rate of just over one-quarter (26.2 percent). Four of the accused individuals confessed, which made the court’s job much easier. If those cases are omitted, the conviction rate falls to just under one-fifth (19.7 percent).
²⁴

Puritan theology depicted witches as heretical servants of the Devil. The legal code also defined witchcraft in theological terms, demanding proof of diabolical allegiance. Yet ordinary men and women were more inclined to think about witchcraft as a practical problem; they were interested less in causation than they were in results. They believed that witchcraft was at work in their communities; they wanted to know who the witch was; and they wanted her punished. Excluding the Salem witch hunt, which produced many testimonies to the Devil’s involvement, depositions in most witch cases reflected that practical preoccupation and rarely made any mention of the Devil. That disjunction between legal requirements and popular testimony led to acquittal in most cases. We might wonder why witnesses did not adapt their testimony to fit legal requirements. That they did not do so suggests that ordinary colonists focused quite doggedly on practical issues when thinking about witchcraft and also that at least some people were much less thoroughly schooled in official ideology than our stereotypes of early New Englanders would suggest.
²⁵

The evidence given against New England’s accused witches generally fell into one of four categories. Most frequently, witnesses described quarrels followed by misfortune or illness, presumably brought on by witchcraft. Second, witnesses claimed that the accused had a reputation for skill as a fortune teller or healer; this established that the accused had occult powers which, it was implied, had also been deployed for malign purposes. Third, witnesses described having used defensive and retaliatory techniques such as Henry Grey inflicted on his heifer; they reported the results of such experiments to the court as incriminating testimony. And finally, neighbors of the accused would describe generally suspicious behavior, such as extraordinary and perhaps superhuman strength.

Like the depositions given at the trials of Elizabeth Clawson and Mercy Disborough, most testimony presented at witch trials in New England proved unconvincing from the perspective of legal and religious experts. As we have seen, magistrates and learned ministers dismissed testimony relating “strange accidents” following quarrels as “slender and uncertain grounds” for conviction. Clergymen denounced defensive magic as “going to the Devil to find the Devil” and warned that Satan was a malicious liar, which hardly encouraged magistrates to convict based on depositions that described such experiments.
²⁶
Judges were occasionally willing to conclude that divination or other magical practices proved collusion between the accused witch and the Devil (ministers did, after all, condemn such techniques as diabolical); but even here magistrates were loathe to convict unless the incriminating testimony made explicit mention of the Devil.

New England witch trials resulted in fewer convictions than did their counterparts across the Atlantic. English statutes en-acted against witchcraft in 1542 and 1563 had defined the crime as a hostile act rather than as heresy, so that popular preoccupation with practical harm was more compatible with legal requirements. Laws in European countries generally defined witchcraft as a diabolical heresy, but there the courts often used torture to extract the kinds of evidence that would justify conviction. English law forbade the use of torture during judicial interrogation and the New England authorities operated under English jurisdiction. The only occasion on which New England courts gathered extensive evidence of diabolical allegiance was the Salem witch hunt, which was also the one occasion on which the authorities made illegal use of physical torture and extreme psychological pressure to extract a large number of confessions.

New England magistrates were willing to convict and execute accused witches. But as in the Puritans’ handling of prosecutions for other capital crimes, the courts refused to convict unless the evidence satisfied rigorous standards of proof: this meant either a voluntary confession, or at least two independent witnesses to an incident demonstrating the individual’s guilt. It was difficult enough to secure two witnesses for other offenses that carried the death penalty, such as adultery and rape.
²⁷
But the challenge was compounded when dealing with an invisible crime that involved collusion with supernatural agents. Witnesses assumed that their personal experiences and impressions would be treated as hard evidence, but judges were interested only in evidence that established diabolical involvement and even then worried about its reliability. Accusers risked their lives in speaking out against a witch, but magistrates also took a risk if they approved the conviction of a witch suspect on the basis of dubious evidence—they might very well be executing an innocent person. Only in a quarter of cases did New England magistrates find the evidence sufficient to justify conviction.

The neighbors and enemies of accused witches who had given what they considered to be damning testimony were often infuriated by the reluctance of magistrates to treat their depositions as legally compelling. From the perspective of many modern Americans, the execution of any person accused of witchcraft seems tragic and unjust. But in the minds of men and women who did not doubt witchcraft’s malevolent power, the acquittal and release of witch suspects was the gross miscarriage of justice. Neighbors sometimes refused to accept an acquittal, conferred with each other, gathered new evidence against the suspect, and then renewed legal charges. Three New Englanders were each prosecuted for witchcraft on three separate occasions; another five appeared in court twice on charges of witchcraft. All of these cases resulted in acquittal.
²⁸
 As the difficulty of securing a legal conviction for witchcraft became increasingly apparent, New Englanders became less inclined to initiate legal prosecutions against suspected witches. Nor were officials eager to take on such cases. There were nineteen witch trials in New England during the 1660s, but only six during the 1670s and eight during the 1680s. Elizabeth Clawson and Mercy Disborough were the first residents of Connecticut to stand trial for that crime in over twenty years.

The dramatic fall in the number of prosecutions for witchcraft during the 1670s and 1680s was not due to any decline in fear of witches. The persistence of that fear became only too clear in 1692, when official encouragement of witch accusations in and around Salem Village resulted in over one hundred and fifty arrests and nineteen executions. We know that news of events in Massachusetts had reached Connecticut by the time townsfolk and villagers came forward to corroborate Katherine Branch’s claim that Goody Clawson and Goody Disborough were witches. The deluge of accusations in Massachusetts and the willingness of officials there to take such allegations seriously doubtless encouraged the smaller but still potentially deadly witch hunt in Fairfield County, Connecticut. Settlers who had kept silent for years about their suspicions against Elizabeth Clawson and Mercy Disborough now felt that surely the courts would have to listen and act. They were to be sorely disappointed.

The witch hunt that took place in Connecticut that year provides a useful corrective to the Salem story. Indeed, the hysteria that erupted in Salem Village has long distorted our perception of early New England.
²⁹
The scale and intensity of that witch hunt was due in large part to its immediate context, a series of recent crises in the region that included a renewal of Indian attacks in northern New England and increased activity by dissenters such as Anglicans and Quakers. These disturbances had fostered intense anxiety among the residents of Massachusetts, who described the physical and spiritual assaults of those years in much the same language that they used to describe witchcraft: as alien, malign, and invasive. Many believed that Indians worshiped the Devil and that Quakers were possessed by Satan. It is no coincidence that Andover, which in 1692 produced more accusations of witchcraft than Salem Village itself, was the first nonfrontier community to have townsmen killed by Indians when a new round of Anglo–Indian hostilities began at the end of the 1680s. Nor was it coincidental that next to Salem Village was the largest concentration of Quaker households in the county. To the colonists, the outbreak of witchcraft in Salem Village was the latest in a series of terrifying demonic assaults that threatened to overwhelm them.

The magistrates charged with handling the resulting panic encouraged accusations and proceeded to convict on the basis of evidence that was by normal legal standards deeply problematic. They did so with the approval of the royal governor and other prominent citizens. Historian Mary Beth Norton has suggested that the support given by Massachusetts leaders to the special court was due in no small part to their own lack of success in repelling Indian attacks: rooting out those responsible for invisible assaults on the colony would deflect attention away from and lessen their own sense of guilt for failing to deal more effectively with more visible enemies. The result was by far the largest and deadliest witch hunt in seventeenth-century New England.
³⁰

The accusations and legal proceedings in Connecticut that year were much more typical of other witch trials in New England. The cast of characters involved in the Salem drama can so easily become caricatured as credulous and even hysterical, but townsfolk in Stamford were for the most part more restrained and skeptical, doing their best to unravel the mystery surrounding Katherine Branch’s fits, conducting careful experiments to confirm or refute their suspicions, conferring with each other to compare stories and weigh the evidence. Some residents were unwilling to believe the allegations against Elizabeth Clawson and Mercy Disborough, not because they doubted the reality of witchcraft but because they questioned whether these particular women were witches. The magistrates were also remarkably cautious: while they had no desire to dismiss or belittle the fears of those who believed that Goody Clawson and Goody Disborough were bewitching their neighbors, they were also determined to meet their own rigorous standards of proof. At least some of those involved in Connecticut’s witch hunt viewed their local crisis in the context of recent events in Salem. The committee that reprieved Mercy Disborough warned explicitly against repeating the errors of judgment that had already led to tragedy in Massachusetts. Like most modern readers, their perspective on what was happening in Connecticut was shaped partly by their knowledge of the infamous trials further north. 

Perhaps one of the most striking similarities between these two witch hunts was that both ended in the release of witch suspects whom significant numbers of people believed to be guilty. Following the suspension of legal proceedings in Salem—in large part because of mounting controversy over the evidence being used to convict defendants—those not yet tried and convicted were released to rejoin their families and resume, as best they could, their normal lives. Nineteen people had been convicted and hanged; one man was crushed to death by stones loaded on his chest because he would not enter a plea of “innocent” or “guilty”; several other individuals died in prison. But over a hundred imprisoned suspects now went free. In Connecticut no executions took place as a result of the special court’s deliberations, though Mercy Disborough came very close to losing her life.