Escaping Salem: The Other Witch Hunt of 1692 (20 page)

Popular disillusionment and official embarrassment following the debacle at Salem and legal wrangles in Connecticut combined to bring about an end to witch trials in New England. By the early eighteenth century a degree of skepticism about certain kinds of allegedly supernatural phenomena began to take hold among those Americans who embraced Enlightenment ideas. But belief in a world of wonders and occult afflictions proved resilient among other Americans. People continued to use defensive magic against witchcraft throughout the eighteenth century. In July 1787, as delegates met in Philadelphia to draft the federal constitution, a woman sustained fatal injuries inflicted by a mob in the city streets because they believed that she was a witch.
³¹

Today we neither hang nor assault suspected witches. But we have experienced our own share of witch hunts in the form of campaigns against people accused of unpopular or unconventional views, usually with little evidence. When Arthur Miller wrote his play
The Crucible
, first performed in 1953 during Senator Joseph McCarthy’s campaign to root out communist “subversives” and spies, Miller sought to remind us that the mobilization of fear, suspicion, and malice can still have devastating results. The impulse to find a scapegoat in times of trouble and to demonize those whom we dislike and fear remains very much alive. Jews and other ethno-religious groups, communists and capitalists, feminists and homosexuals, liberals and conservatives, religious fundamentalists—each group has figured in the minds of its enemies as an evil and alien force that threatens to corrode and destroy. A periodic need for witch hunts would appear to be one of the more resilient as well as one of the least admirable human instincts.

It was in response to a political “witch hunt” in the early 1950s, targeting people suspected of Communist sympathies and led by Senator Joseph
McCarthy, that Arthur Miller wrote
The Crucible
, a powerful and moving dramatization of the tragic events that took place in Salem. Miller
was himself summoned before the Un-American Activities Committee. 
(Source: Reproduced by permission of the Library of Congress.)

Nor has a fear of power in the hands of women disappeared along with witch trials. Women who assume positions of visible authority still arouse hostility on both sides of the Atlantic. In the 1980s, the organizers of a Labour Party rally in England to protest rising unemployment under Margaret Thatcher’s government planned to use “Ditch the Witch” as their slogan until someone protested that this was sexist—they then relented and used "Ditch the Bitch" instead.
³²
Equally venomous attacks on Hilary Rodham Clinton during her husband’s term of office as President of the United States in the 1990s expressed an intense, fearful response on the part of some Americans to the First Lady’s personality and behavior, which challenged still powerful precepts about a woman’s role in American society.

None of the impulses that drive witch hunts (seventeenth-century or modern) are necessarily cynical or insincere—they reflect genuine fears as well as the impulse to lash out when frightened or thwarted. But theologians in early New England recommended a counterbalance to that impulse that remains applicable today: they argued that any legitimate response to adversity must involve self-scrutiny and the acknowledgment that we are sometimes at least partly responsible for our own misfortunes. Few of us today would wish to identify too closely with the Puritan tendency to extreme self-censure, yet accepting the possibility that the blame for one’s problems might not always lie entirely with others strikes me as morally necessary and constructive. Yet a voyage into one’s own moral interior can be alarming and unwelcome. That people chose then and still choose now to demonize others instead of recognizing their own share of human frailty is one of our most persistent tragedies.

1. Gershom Bulkeley to Joseph Bulkeley, 3 June 1696, in Donald Lines Jacobus, ed.,
History and Genealogy of the Families of Old Fairfield
, 2 vols.
(1930–32; Baltimore: Genealogical Publishing Co., 1976), 2:300–302.

2. Ibid., 1:187.

3. Ibid. 1:148–49; Jeanne Majdaleny,
The Early Settlement of Stamford,
1641–1700
(Bowie, Md.: Heritage Books, 1990), 154–55.

4. See Jon Butler,
The Huguenots in America: A Refugee People in New
World Society
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1983).

5. Jacobus,
History and Genealogy
, 1:661–62.

6. Keith Thomas,
Religion and the Decline of Magic
(New York: Scribners, 1971), 5.

7. Ibid., 9.

8. David D. Hall,
Worlds of Wonder, Days of Judgment: Popular Religious Belief in Early New England
(New York: Knopf, 1989), 11, 71.

9. John Dane, “A Declaration of Remarkable Providences in the Course of My Life,” in
Remarkable Providences: Readings on Early American History
, ed. John Demos (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1991), 63.

10. For a detailed examination of magical lore and practice, see Richard Godbeer,
The Devil’s Dominion: Magic and Religion in Early New England
(New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992), esp. Chap. 1. For more on Tituba see Elaine G. Breslaw,
Tituba, Reluctant Witch of Salem: Devilish Indians and Puritan Fantasies
(New York: New York University Press, 1996).

11. John Hale,
A Modest Enquiry into the Nature of Witchcraft
(Boston, 1702), 21, 248–49. For discussion of clerical opposition to magic, see Godbeer,
The Devil’s Dominion
, Chap. 2.

12. Carol Karlsen,
The Devil in the Shape of a Woman: Witchcraft in
Colonial New England
(New York: Norton, 1987), 47–48. For a recent study of men accused as witches in their own right, see Lara Apps and Andrew Gow,
Male Witches in Early Modern Europe
(Manchester, U.K.: Manchester University Press, 2003). Contrary to conventional wisdom, Apps and Gow argue that in some parts of Europe more men than women were accused of witchcraft.

13. Elizabeth Reis,
Damned Women: Sinners and Witches in Puritan
New England
(Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1997), 108, 110.

14. John Cotton,
A Meet Help
(Boston, 1699), 14, 21.

15. Karlsen,
The Devil in the Shape of a Woman
, 165.

16. Christina Larner,
Enemies of God: The Witch-Hunt in Scotland
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1981), 101–2.

17. Karlsen discusses the demographic, economic, and temperamental characteristics of accused witches in
The Devil in the Shape of a Woman
, Chapters 2–4.

18. Children and young women who claimed to be possessed often engaged in illicit behavior—running amok, blaspheming, insulting authority figures, and disobeying parents or masters—without having to take the blame for their actions. After all, it was the witch or Devil that made them do it. Carol Karlsen argues that possession enabled powerless individuals to express discontent and rebel against those with authority in a context that would position them as victims: they could project their own illicit feelings onto the witch or Devil within. See Karlsen,
The Devil in the Shape
of a Woman
, Chap. 7.

19. John Putnam Demos,
Entertaining Satan: Witchcraft and the Culture of Early New England
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1982), 312.

20. Ibid., 311–12.

21. See Alan Macfarlane,
Witchcraft in Tudor and Stuart England
(London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1970); Keith Thomas, “Anthropology and the Study of English Witchcraft,” in
Witchcraft Confessions and Accusations
, ed. Mary Douglas (London: Tavistock Publications, 1970); and Max Marwick, “Witchcraft as a Social Stress-Gauge,” in
Witchcraft and Sorcery:
Selected Readings
, ed. Max Marwick (Harmondsworth, U.K.: Penguin, 1970).

22. That tension between the values of moral community and individual self-interest was at least partly responsible for the 1692 outbreak of witch accusations in Salem Village. Paul Boyer and Stephen Nissenbaum
have argued that factional conflicts within the village help to explain who accused whom that year and that those divisions were rooted in disputes over economic welfare and cultural values. See Paul Boyer and Stephen Nissenbaum,
Salem Possessed: The Social Origins of Witchcraft
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1974).

23. Demos,
Entertaining Satan
, 312.

24. Godbeer,
The Devil’s Dominion
, 158.

25. Ibid., Chap. 5.

26. Hale,
A Modest Enquiry
, 21.

27. Richard Godbeer,
Sexual Revolution in Early America
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002), 102–4.

28. Godbeer,
The Devil’s Dominion
, 172–73.

29. The volume of literature on Salem is immense. For a useful sam-pling, see Marc Mappen, ed.,
Witches and Historians: Interpretations of
Salem
(Malabar, Fla.: Krieger Publishing Company, 1996), and also Elaine G. Breslaw, ed.,
Witches of the Atlantic World: A Historical Reader and Primary Sourcebook
(New York: New York University Press, 2000). Recent books on the subject include Bernard Rosenthal,
Salem Story: Reading the
Witch Trials of 1692
(New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993); Frances Hill,
A Delusion of Satan: The Full Story of the Salem Witch Trials
(New York: Doubleday, 1995); Peter Hoffer,
The Devil’s Disciples: Makers
of the Salem Witchcraft Trials
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996); Bryan F. Le Beau,
The Story of the Salem Witch Trials
(Upper Saddle River, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1998); and Mary Beth Norton,
In the Devil’s
Snare: The Salem Witchcraft Crisis of 1692
(New York: Knopf, 2002).

30. Norton,
In the Devil’s Snare
, esp. 299–300.

31. For discussion of continued belief in witchcraft see Godbeer,
The
Devil’s Dominion
, 223–33.

32. Christina Larner,
Witchcraft and Religion: The Politics of Popular
Belief
(Oxford, U.K.: Basil Blackwell, 1984), 84.

A. The Connecticut Witch Hunt of 1692

Almost all of the documents surviving from the trials are to be found in the Wyllys Papers at the John Hay Library, Brown University, and the Samuel Wyllys Papers at the Connecticut State Library. The petition of 4 June 1692 supporting Elizabeth Clawson is owned by the Stamford Historical Society. Most of these documents have recently been published in David D. Hall, ed.,
Witch-Hunting in Seventeenth-Century New England: A Documentary History, 1638–1693
, 2nd ed., Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1999, 315–54.

Historical Accounts of the Witch Hunt:

Marcus, Ronald.
“Elizabeth Clawson...Thou Deservest to Dye”: An
Account of the Trial in 1692 of a Woman from Stamford, Connecticut, Who Was Accused of Being a Witch
. Stamford, Conn.: Stamford Historical Society, 1976.

Taylor, John M.
The Witchcraft Delusion in Colonial Connecticut,
1647–1697
. New York: Grafton Press, 1908.

Tomlinson, Richard G.
Witchcraft Trials of Connecticut: The First Comprehensive, Documented History of Witchcraft Trials in Colonial
Connecticut
. Hartford, Conn.: Connecticut Research, Inc., 1978.

Local Histories

Feinstein, Estelle S.
Stamford from Puritan to Patriot: The Shaping of a
Connecticut Community, 1641–1774
. Stamford, Conn.: Stamford Bicentennial Corporation, 1976.

Huntington, Elijah B.
History of Stamford, Connecticut
. Stamford, Conn.: William Gillespie & Co., 1868.

Jacobus, Donald Lines.
History and Genealogy of the Families of Old
Fairfield
, 2 vols. Fairfield, Conn., 1930–32.

McLean, Louise H. “The Sellecks of Early Stamford.”
Darien Historical Society Annual
1, no. 7 (March 1961): 3–9.

Majdalany, Jeanne.
The Early Settlement of Stamford, Connecticut,
1641–1700
. Bowie, Md.: Heritage Books, 1990.

B. Witchcraft in Seventeenth-Century

New England

Boyer, Paul and Stephen Nissenbaum.
Salem Possessed: The Social
Origins of Witchcraft
. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1974.

Breslaw, Elaine G.
Tituba, Reluctant Witch of Salem: Devilish Indians
and Puritan Fantasies
. New York: New York University Press, 1996.

Demos, John Putnam.
Entertaining Satan: Witchcraft and the Culture
of Early New England
. New York: Oxford University Press, 1982.

Godbeer, Richard.
The Devil’s Dominion: Magic and Religion in Early
New England
. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992.

Godbeer, Richard. “Chaste and Unchaste Covenants: Witchcraft and Sex in Early Modern Culture.” In
Wonders of the Invisible
World, 1600–1900
, ed. Peter Benes. Boston: Boston University Press, 1995.