The Enemy Within (31 page)

One inevitable, irrepressible question, with many different answers. Yet the answers are not of equal weight; indeed, some can be discarded completely. Forget class conflict. Forget ergotism. Forget encephalitis. The match with the evidence is too weak to support any of them.

Several others seem obvious and unexceptionable—and thus not very helpful. Yes, a few of the “afflicted” may have been acting, or lying, or cleverly dissembling—even while their fellow accusers were in the grip of true, and harrowing, psychopathology. And yes, Puritan belief and practice was hard on young children. (For that matter, it was also pretty demanding for adults.) It seems likely, too, that certain individual suspects did actually attempt the practice of witchcraft; but we have no plausible way to distinguish them from others who were falsely accused.

When the list has been suitably trimmed, a number of entries yet remain. They need not compete with one another; to the contrary, they can be joined so as to create a powerfully inclusive whole. Witch-hunts, like most large social and historical phenomena, invariably show a pattern of multiple causation; in scientific language, they are overdetermined. And the case of Salem, because it is so well documented, allows us to identify a broad array of causes—and also to observe the manner of their joining.

Start around the year 1675. By then Salem (both Town and Village) already shows signs of incipient factionalism. There are small farmers, geared to old-style “subsistence” production. There are other farmers, somewhat more prosperous and forward-looking, who are beginning to produce for the market. There are tradesmen and artisans, who operate on a community-wide basis. Finally, there are merchants, whose economic horizons extend all around the Atlantic basin. Each of these groups represents a different way of being in the world. They continue, of course, to share a great deal; they live at close quarters; they interact frequently; they directly cooperate from time to time. But they also feel—and actually are—distinct from one another. Viewed from our perspective, they stretch across a spectrum: from peasantlike to entrepreneurial, from “traditional” to “protomodern.” Soon Salem will see them directly counterposed in a series of bitter, internecine conflicts that will stretch through almost two decades. The underlying issue here is social and economic change. New modes of production and trade—amounting, roughly, to early capitalism—are increasingly important and
visible.
These, in turn, create new interests, new values, new expectations, new life-styles. But the old ways die hard. And in places like Salem Village, they find a corps of especially determined defenders.

As part of the same scenario, and in common with many neighboring communities, Salem feels the deep moral reproach encapsulated by the term “declension.” Leaders and plain folk alike lament their losing touch with the spiritual wellsprings that had once fed their “errand” and shaped their core identity. Meanwhile, too, a political crisis looms, as administrative changes enacted by royal authority overseas steadily erode the self-governing traditions passed down from their forebears. Indeed, when New England's official charters are temporarily revoked (1684-91), title to the very lands they live on is potentially at risk. Their Puritan religious establishment is also under challenge, as Anglican churches, with direct ties to the mother country, rise alongside their cherished congregational meetinghouses. Yet another kind of crisis comes with an outbreak of smallpox in 1689, perhaps the most severe of the many 17th-century epidemics to strike their region. And in 1690, their long-standing project to evict the French from control of Canada ends in abject failure, when a Quebec-bound fleet carrying thousands of their soldiers and sailors founders off the coast of Acadia (Nova Scotia). Take it all around, and New Englanders of the 1680s and early '90s—including those living in Salem—may easily come to feel a
general
movement of “Divine Providence” against them.

Finally, there is the pressure of Indian enemies. This, too, is felt throughout New England, but with special force in those places lying closest to nodes of actual warfare. Essex County is positioned exactly so; its northern sector abuts the coastal communities of New Hampshire and Maine, where the specter of conflict with native peoples is omnipresent. The First and Second Indian Wars destroy both lives and property on a massive scale; and even in the intervals between wars, episodic violence continues. Essex County residents are directly involved, some militarily, others as traders, land speculators, and would-be settlers. Still others are pulled in through the suffering of kin and friends who live in the affected areas. The current also runs in the opposite direction, as refugees seeking to escape the devastation flee southward into Massachusetts. All this is accompanied by the widespread dissemination of horrific war stories, rumors, and threats. The cumulative result is nothing less than an overwhelming and highly toxic climate of fear.

In sum: an entire region teeters on the edge. And if this configuration points toward one place more than others, it would have to be . . . Salem. There, the two factors of greatest causal significance—rising capitalism and Indian terror—fully converge. The ensuing ripples circle well out into the surrounding countryside, but their center and source point is clear. Thus does Salem become, in Arthur Miller's perfectly chosen image, the “crucible” for early America's most far-reaching, deadly, and lastingly famous witch-hunt of all.

CHAPTER IX

The reputation of witch-hunter hangs like a noose around the ghost of Cotton Mather. More than anyone else from his time and place, Mather has been held responsible for the “zeal,” the “fanaticism,” the “bigotry” and “prejudice” that drove the Salem trials to their lethal end. His reported intervention at the execution of “wizard” George Burroughs—perched on a horse, exhorting a large crowd of onlookers to suppress any last-minute feelings of doubt or sympathy—has long been seen as emblematic.

In fact, this picture is overdrawn. The “discovery” of witches and witchcraft was important to Mather, especially during the first dozen or so of his adult years. But it did not define his life and work; rather, it formed one strand in a remarkably variegated career. Viewed overall, Mather's involvement in witch-hunting was as prudent, as nuanced, as ambivalent even, as that of any of his contemporaries. He seems, then, less an extreme case of witch-hunting than an exemplary one.

 
He is born in February 1663, the first child of Reverend Increase and Maria
(
Cotton
)
Mather. Almost at once he shows signs of precocity, especially in his spiritual development. He begins to pray as soon as he can speak; at age two and a half, having fallen dangerously ill, he declares to Increase, “Father, Ton [his nickname] would go see God.” He learns very early to read and write, and is composing prayers for his playmates by the time he turns seven. He becomes a favored pupil of the famed Boston schoolmaster Ezekiel Cheever, from whom he learns Latin, Greek, and Hebrew (among other things); eventually, he will master no fewer than seven different languages
(including Iroquois). He is admitted to Harvard at age 12, performs with distinction there, and becomes at 15 the College's youngest graduate of the entire 17th century.

 
Mather's personal history and the history of Boston were intertwined in many ways—not least through his lineage. His grandfathers, John Cotton and Richard Mather, had been leaders in the settlement process—as ministers at Boston's First Church and nearby Dorchester, respectively. His father, meanwhile, was a notably rising star among the younger clergy.

Boston was founded in 1630 at the start of a so-called great migration of dissident Puritans from Old England and would remain at the edge of religious reform for several decades thereafter. Its earliest years were marked by a mood of special hope and excitement—one might almost say a spiritual “high,” embracing the entire community—as churches were “gathered,” conversions announced, and farmsteads raised on the newly claimed land. Indeed, the New England settlers, including their Boston contingent, have some claim even now to a place at the head of what would later become a long line of American “utopian experiments.”

By the time of Cotton Mather's birth, however, that initial élan had begun to wane. The Puritan Revolution in the mother country was over—reversed and repudiated by the Restoration of the Stuart monarchy in 1660. The aging and eventual disappearance of the founders' cohort proved particularly unsettling. A hotly contested decision in 1669 to lower the standard for admission to church membership (known, then and since, as the Halfway Covenant) appeared to signal a general “declension” of religious purpose. There followed, in rapid succession, a devastating race war (King Philip's War, 1675- 76), the revocation by the king of the Massachusetts charter (1684), and the installation of a new “Dominion” government (1686) in order to exert a stronger, fuller measure of imperial control. The latter was overturned three years later, when news reached Boston of the Glorious Revolution in the motherland (1689). A bloodless coup expelled the royal governor and set in motion a chain of events that would lead to yet another, less restrictive, political charter for the Bay Colony (1691).

 
His own experience of the 1680s brings Cotton Mather to a position of great prestige and influence. He plays, for example, a leading role in the political crisis of those years. He and his father help form a party of covert opposition to the Dominion authorities. And when Increase goes off to London to plead the colony's interest at the king's court, Cotton moves to the very center of Boston's resistance. He is involved in secret meetings to prepare for the ouster of the administration. When the crucial moment arrives, it is he who drafts key public documents announcing, and justifying, a change of governance. (One of these, officially titled A
Declaration of Merchants and Ministers
, anticipates both the spirit and substance of the Declaration of Independence nearly a century later.)

In this context, and in response also to a rising spirit of secularism, religious leaders are stirred ever more strongly by “providential” concerns. In 1684 Increase Mather publishes an important work entitled
An Essay for the Recording of Illustrious Providences
, with the aim of demonstrating the power of the supernatural world; among its numerous chapters are several devoted to witchcraft. And Cotton is poised to make his own contribution to the same cause.