The Enemy Within (30 page)

The work proliferated along several different tracks: ideas of witchcraft in relation to other cultural phenomena, such as magic, fortune-telling, and astrology; anxiety about witchcraft as a reflection of “inner-life preoccupation” (in short, its underpinnings in psychology); charges of witchcraft as a measure of “social strain.” The Salem witch-hunt had a place in this interpretive enterprise, and lent it useful material, but made no claim of special preference. As one historian put it, “Salem was unique in its quantitative dimension—witch-hunting gone wild—and for that reason alone has exercised a disproportionate hold on the public imagination.” There was nothing unique, however, about its qualitative patterning. In matters such as the style and substance of accusation, the types of people involved, and the occasions leading up to an actual court proceeding, Salem was broadly consistent with witch trials at other times and places in early New England. Salem
alongside
others, Salem
together with
others: thus the framing of the new approach.

 
Salemwitchcraft and patriarchal privilege

 
Of course, these inquiries might still throw valuable light on the events of 1692. And one of them, especially, merits further description here: Carol Karlsen's
The Devil in the Shape of a Woman
(1986). Karlsen began by asking to what extent, and in what ways, economic difference might have contributed to fueling witchcraft charges against particular women. Her conclusion, after much painstaking local research, was that women of all economic levels were at least potential targets; then, as she refined her evidence, she discovered something more. The
most
likely targets were those whose direct control of property went well beyond the usual expectation—for women. The culture at large was frankly patriarchal; for example, it everywhere affirmed a principle of male inheritance. Married women could not ordinarily hold property in their own right; a widow was granted simply the “use” of her late husband's estate with no right of transfer to others. Yet exceptions were inevitable, especially in families lacking male heirs; there, the women involved might gain a measure of real economic independence. And that seemed unnatural—or, at any rate, unacceptable—sufficiently so to ground suspicions of witchcraft.

A considerable portion of the women accused at Salem did fit, quite closely, the profile of “independent women” traced by Karlsen (Bridget Bishop, Martha Corey, Rachel Clinton, and Alice Parker, among others, together with many from earlier cases). Her point, at bottom, was about gender more than economics—and it was compelling. Since no other aspect of this entire subject-area has seemed so obvious, but at the same time so resistant to explanation, as the fundamental equation of witch and woman, Karlsen's work was quickly, and widely, acknowledged.

 
Salemwitchcraft as anniversary pageant

 
The 1990s produced a renewed surge of Salem witchcraft histories: no fewer than five major books, plus a host of anthologies and shorter writings. In part, this was an anniversary phenomenon. Nineteen ninety-two marked three hundred years since the start of the trials; and modern-era denizens of “the witch city” made the most of it. There were learned conferences (and some not so learned), elaborate museum exhibitions, carefully staged tours of the leading physical sites, vivid “re-enactments,” and a great deal of heavily hyped marketing: in short, a veritable outpouring of pageantry. How does one commemorate—even celebrate—a “tragedy”? Salem showed the way.

On the whole, the new book-length studies offered narrative retellings of the trial sequence, rather than sweeping reinterpretations. There were, however, differences of emphasis and some challenges to prior work. Larry Gragg's
The Salem Witch Crisis
(1992) stressed the importance of “particular decisions made by the individuals involved” (as opposed to broad structural conditions). Bernard Rosenthal, in
Salem Story: Reading the Witch Trials of 1692
(1993), used his textual expertise as a literature scholar to cast doubt on portrayals of the “afflicted” as hysterics; with many of them, Rosenthal argued (echoing others, as far back as Hutchinson), outright fakery came closer to the mark. Peter Charles Hoffer, in
The Devil's Disciples: Makers of the Salem Witch Trials
(1996), focused very closely on “the girls' circle,” and, even more sharply than Rosenthal, questioned their honesty. They were not very different, in Hoffer's view, from “a gang of juvenile delinquents”; in most cases, they “knew that they were lying.” Frances Hill's
A Delusion of Satan: The Full Story of the Salem Witch Trials
(1995) proposed a line of interpretation midway between “deliberate fraud” and “clinical hysteria.” Eschewing any sort of one-size-fits-all approach, Hill summed up the motives for accusation as “a mixture of hysteria, vengeful fury, evil mischief, and longing.”

 
Salemwitchcraft as epidemic illness

 
One book in the 1990s crop did bring forward a truly novel idea. Laurie Winn Carlson's
A Fever in Salem: A New Interpretation of the New England Witch Trials
(1999) argued that epidemic encephalitis (or “sleeping sickness”) was the fundamental cause of the 1692 “outbreak.” Carlson seized on a little-noticed aspect of the trial evidence: the fact that animals had supposedly experienced “afflictions . . . eerily like those of the ‘bewitched' people.” Indeed, the records said as much; cattle, in particular, were described as falling into convulsions, “roaring” and “dancing” as if possessed, and occasionally dying in strangely “tortured” ways. From this Carlson inferred that “a biological pathogen was afflicting both people and livestock.” Then, following the method used by Caporael and Mattosian to advance their ergotism hypothesis, Carlson canvassed a host of medical and epidemiological authorities in order to match the “symptoms” of witchcraft victims with the clinical picture for encephalitis. Her specific point of reference was a worldwide pandemic during the years 1918-20, in which she claimed to have found a host of close similarities. Moreover, she extended her interpretive line to include flocks of migratory birds carrying microbes across oceans and continents; hemispheric wind patterns and storm tracks; mosquitoes, ticks, and other ground-level transmitters; and relationships among the various human sufferers themselves. Ultimately, however, this apparatus became so large and cumbersome, and so remote from specific bits of historical evidence, that it seemed to topple of its own weight. It covered both too much and too little; as a result, the proposed link—witchcraft to encephalitis—slowly came apart, one little piece after another. Put differently, the Devil was not in these particular details, after all.

 
Salemwitchcraft and fear of Indians

 
As three decades thick with witchcraft studies came to an end, one might well have expected a pause in this long progression. Indeed, what more could possibly be said about the “causes” of the Salem trials?

Surprisingly, there
was
more to say. In 2002, the distinguished colonial historian Mary Beth Norton published the fruits of a decade-long research project in a book entitled
In the Devil's Snare: The Salem Witchcraft Crisis of 1692
. Norton had achieved an across-the-board mastery of the materials beyond anything seen before; her work offered the most rounded and comprehensive treatment of its subject yet. Simply as a narrative—sorting out the basic sequence, establishing the links between key persons and events—it was unsurpassed. Moreover, it effectively revised certain of the chief interpretive issues: the central role of confessing witches, for example, and the complex collaboration between afflicted accusers on the one hand and the magistrates in charge of the courtroom proceedings on the other. But these important gains in understanding were themselves overshadowed by a major research discovery involving a host of dynamic connections between the witch-hunt and the northeastern New England frontier.

On setting out, Norton had “no idea” about the importance of this latter dimension. But the evidence kept leading her away from Salem and Essex County, and toward the coastal communities of New Hampshire and Maine. There, starting in 1675, English settlers and their Wabanaki neighbors had engaged in repeated warfare. The initial round, part of the larger King Philip's War, lasted until 1677. Its successor, begun in 1689 and linked to what participants called King William's War, was focused more closely on the frontier regions; the fighting would last into, and beyond, the period of the witch trials. Along the northern coast these were also described as, simply, the First and Second Indian Wars. They attained throughout an extraordinary level of ferocity, with attacks and counterattacks piled rapidly one upon another. Whole communities were burned to the ground; hundreds of men, women, and children were killed (on both sides, sometimes after gruesome torture); captives were taken and held for months or years. Armies came up from Massachusetts to defend the beleaguered English villagers; there was French support (via Canada) for the equally desperate Indians. Battle reports—including full-blown atrocity stories—traveled back with some regularity to points above and below. The result, especially in the affected region but also in nearby Essex County, was a steadily mounting wave of “panic fear.”

All this had long been known to historians; what hadn't been known was its many-stranded linkage to Salem and the 1692 trials. One strand, as Norton discovered through meticulous genealogical sleuthing, was simply and directly personal; in short, many individuals who played key roles in the trials had previously resided on the Maine frontier, or had familial or business connections to it. This was the case with some among the afflicted accusers. Mercy Lewis, for example, had spent most of her childhood in the community of Falmouth, Maine, and had lost family members to the fighting there; Mercy Short had actually been for several months a Wabanaki captive. Key confessors had similar backstories. Abigail Hobbs, like Lewis, had lived for several years in Falmouth; indeed, her confession began with an account of meeting the Devil in the woods outside that town in the late 1680s. And several of the accused were merchants accustomed to trading along the frontier: Philip English, John Alden, John Floyd, and Nathaniel Cary, among others. English was of French background and a French speaker; accordingly, some of his Salem neighbors suspected him of dealings with Frenchmen friendly to the Wabanakis. Alden had occasionally served as a negotiator with both French and native leaders; and when Ann Putnam Jr. confronted his specter in the course of an agonizing fit, she shouted out the remarkable charge that “he sells powder and shot to the Indians and French, and lies with Indian squaws, and has Indian papooses.” George Burroughs, the supposed “head and ringleader” of all the New England witches, had served as minister first in Falmouth and then in Wells (also in Maine). Governor Phips himself had been born and raised in Maine.

Beyond these personal connections, the very language and imagery of witch-trial accusation evoked Indians. When, time after time, accusers and confessors described the Devil's skin color as “black,” they were referencing not Africans, of whom they had as yet only limited experience, but Native Americans. (One accuser spoke of “a short black man . . . not of a Negro, but of a tawny, or an Indian, color.” And Cotton Mather noted that when confessing witches described Satan as “the black man . . . they generally say he resembles an Indian.”) Another common tendency was to describe the agony of affliction through images of being “torn to pieces” and “knocked in the head”—thereby recalling lurid tales of Indian captivity, in which prisoners underwent physical dismemberment, scalping, or killing by blows from native hatchets. Even the timing of the witch-hunt corresponded to events in the frontier war. Its beginning, in late winter, followed closely on a major assault by French and Indian forces against the Maine town of York, and its springtime surge coincided with a similar attack on nearby Wells. Moreover, contemporaries recognized the underlying connection here; many would have approved Cotton Mather's assertion that “the prodigious war made by the spirits of the invisible world upon the people of New England in the year 1692 . . . might have some of its original among the Indians, whose chief sagamores [leaders] are well known to have been horrid sorcerers and hellish conjurors and such as conversed with demons.”

This was the tableau Norton laid out in abundant, and altogether persuasive, detail. Her final, summative point drew the two concurrent “crises” even more closely together. New Englanders faced “an alliance of their enemies in the visible and invisible worlds”—with witches and Indians, Satan and “sagamores,” virtually morphed into one. Indeed, “had the Second Indian War on the northeastern frontier somehow been avoided, the Essex County witchcraft crisis of 1692 would not have occurred.”

New Englanders blamed themselves for committing the sins that had prompted the Lord to allow such a devastating, double-barreled assault. But Norton, for her part, was more inclined to blame their leaders.
“It must always be remembered,”
she wrote, using italics for emphasis,
“that the judges of the Court of Oyer and Terminer were the very men who led the colony both politically and militarily.”
Responsible, as they mostly were, for failure to stem attacks by “visible” enemies, these men welcomed the opportunity to “shift responsibility . . . to the demons of the invisible world.” And then, as a direct result, “they presided over the deaths of many innocent people.”

Divine retribution. Fraud. Class conflict. Village factionalism. Mental illness. Cultural provincialism. Vulnerable children. Hysteria. Political repression. Shifting social boundaries. Actual witchcraft. Approaching capitalism. Ergot poisoning. Patriarchal privilege. Encephalitis. Fear of Indians.