The Enemy Within Page 10

  The same refrain continued to be heard in all regions long after the initial period of colonization: Indians as “minions of Satan,” as “sorcerers” and “conjurors,” as consorters with “Evil Angels.” However, there is a notable gap in such depictions: Indians do not appear as perpetrators of maleficium. This element, the infliction of injury by diabolical means, was everywhere key to the image of homegrown witches; hence, its absence in portrayals of native culture is striking.

  In fact, the activity that the colonists were identifying as Indian witchcraft was what we would now call shamanism. The powwaws were, for the most part, practitioners of traditional medicine: witch doctors perhaps, but not witches in the full and classic European sense. One early colonist noted that their main “office and duty” was “curing diseases of the sick and wounded.” Another described them as “partly wizards and witches . . . [and] partly physicians”; in the latter capacity, moreover, “they seem to do wonders.” What made them objectionable, in European eyes, was their apparent “familiarity with Satan,” their propensity to “cure by the help of the devil”—in short, their methods rather than their intended and actual results. Close-up observation brought their “Satanism” into sharp focus; a typical account of an Indian powwaw emphasized his “hideous bellowing and groaning . . . sometimes roaring like a bear . . . foaming at the mouth like a chased boar, smiting his naked breast and thighs with such violence as if he were mad,” all of which “will he continue sometimes half the day.” Such “fiendish rites” could only be inspired by the Archfiend himself. And they were bizarre, awesome, terrifying.

  Still, none of this is quite the same as maleficium. So, again: Did individual Indians, and especially the powwaws themselves, attempt to effect their own forms of harmful witchcraft? And did Indians at large believe in such possibilities? Certainly this was true of native groups well inland—the Sioux of the Great Plains, the Navajo in the Southwest. However, for eastern Indians, those living closest to the early colonies, evidence of such belief (and practice) is virtually nil. If the colonists had seen signs of native maleficium, they surely would have said as much.

  It seems significant, moreover, that native people (including their powwaws) were never prosecuted in colonial courts on charges of witchcraft. They could be, and sometimes were, prosecuted on other charges—violating English laws against public drunkenness or theft or murder, for example—but not on this one. Moreover, the colonists, while harboring a deep revulsion against native powwawing, appear to have felt that it held no power to affect them, either for good or for ill. Nor, for that matter, could it much affect native converts to Christianity; they, too, had a kind of cultural immunity. Thus the overall picture was sharply mixed. Europeans were predisposed to associate Indians with Satanism and witchcraft, and were deeply troubled by the connection. Yet absent maleficium, Indian witchcraft seemed a different, and distinctly lesser, thing. As time and experience would repeatedly confirm, for colonists everywhere the most dangerous witches were those found within their own fold.

  As the years passed, a third major cultural stream would intersect those of native people and European settlers: the African, and African American. Small groups of Africans began arriving in the British colonies as early as 1619. (Of course, they were migrants of a very different sort: kidnapped from their homelands and transported entirely against their will.) Their numbers grew at a gradual pace through the rest of the 17th century, and then quite explosively in the century that followed. The single most important element in their lives was, of course, enslavement; especially after about 1660, almost all Africans and their American-born progeny were held in perpetual bondage by white colonists. But perhaps the second most important element was the persistence, in various forms, of their own indigenous traditions.

  In their homelands, magical practice, including witchcraft and sorcery, had been central to a rich and enormously variegated pattern of engagement with the supernatural. When transferred to America it became, necessarily, truncated and in many ways distorted. In broad terms, it encompassed a host of “spirits” whose influence on the quotidian details of life had always seemed large and now grew even more powerful. At the same time, its point and purview would gradually shift away from the ostensibly beneficent (fertility, healing, and the like), toward the more directly harmful (loss, injury, and death). This, one imagines, reflected the darkened—not to say desperate—circumstances in which such cruelly transplanted people found themselves.

  Much of the evidence we have here flowed initially from the pens of white colonists. Time after time their writings referred to “conjurors” and “poison doctors” among the slave population. They made frequent reference, also, to specific episodes of magical practice, and even to the particulars of method and technique: charms, invocations, and substances such as “powders, roots, herbs, and simples.” A different, literally more solid sort of evidence comes from under the ground. Archaeologists have been able to recover some of the paraphernalia of African American magic: amulets, beads, carefully-shaped objects in glass, ceramic, and wood—even, in one striking instance, a stringed penis bone from a raccoon (perhaps to promote fertility). There are linguistic markers as well: words found in both African and American venues, such as juju (for evil spirit), moco (for witchcraft or magic), ubio (for charm), and, most famously, wudu or vodun (for what we now call voodoo, or “black magic”). Taken together, these materials reveal a distinctive African-American spiritual presence in the colonies—especially the southern and Caribbean colonies where slavery would greatly proliferate after 1700.

  As a matter of actual usage, most of this was confined within the black population itself. But slaveowners, and other white folk too, repeatedly expressed fears of harm from the “sorceries” of their bondsmen; most of all, they feared “poisoning.” This term seems notably elastic wherever it shows up in written documents. In some cases it described a straightforward physical process (the ingestion of a lethal substance), but in others it apparently referred to supernatural power (poisoning by way of spirits or malefic magic). Dozens, if not hundreds, of slaves would eventually be suspected, accused, convicted, and put to death—burnt at the stake, drawn and quartered, or simply hanged—for alleged acts of poisoning.

  Slave sorceries, real or imagined, directed against masters and other white people were an exception. The largest source of “diabolical” danger, or so most colonists believed, remained with and among their own kind. And, to repeat: such belief was prevalent throughout the entirety of British America during the colonial years.

  But prevalence was one thing, intensity another. In some regions—the “middle colonies,” for example—concern with witchcraft was thinly maintained, and rarely led on to official action. In others, especially New England, it was a deeply rooted, activating presence; there, formal accusation, involving whole communities and generating full-blown legal proceedings, remained plausible, even (at intervals) likely. This distinction may structure our further inquiry. Indeed, it is itself a subject for inquiry: New England as compared with all the rest. Let us start with the rest.

  Virginia holds the site of the first colonial settlement in British America. And Virginia is also the source of the earliest surviving (and unambiguous) traces of witchcraft in British America. In 1626, its General Court heard charges against a certain Goodwife Joan Wright. During several years at the Kickotan plantation, Wright had earned the reputation of “a very bad woman” by telling fortunes (usually about impending death), “railing” at neighbors, and, most ominously, uttering mysterious threats of harm to any who “crossed” her. Her targets included two men who had subsequently failed in hunting despite “coming to good game and very fair to shoot at,” another whose “plants were . . . all . . . drowned,” and an entire family made sick and “dangerously sore.” (The exact circumstances and final disposition of this case are not known. Indeed, the volume in which the testimony survives would have perished, together with most other records from Virginia’s
earliest years, in a fire during the Civil War, had not Thomas Jefferson carried it off long before; it is found in the Jefferson Papers today.) In 1641 another court adjudicated a dispute between two women, Jane Rookins and the wife of George Busher (her given name is not recorded). They had fallen into a loud quarrel, at the height of which Rookins denounced Busher as a witch. Busher’s husband then brought suit for defamation on her behalf. Rookins claimed not to recall the alleged accusation, but apologized anyway. The court took this as a sufficient resolution of the matter, adding simply that the defendant must pay all the costs of prosecution.

  Versions of the same story would be repeated many times in other small communities nearby. Indeed, most recorded references to witchcraft in early Virginia actually come from defamation cases. All told, there were approximately 20 of these, with a roughly even split between acquittals and convictions. Punishments, when ordered, typically involved the payment of fines. Often, as with Busher versus Rookins, a public apology was the most important element, since reputations were so obviously at stake; one plaintiff explicitly stated that, as a result of being labeled a witch, her neighbors refused to “keep company” with her. There is evidence, too, that some of the individuals thus defamed had been subject to physical assault and felt their lives to be in danger.

  The records afford at least a glimpse of the particular suspicions aroused—of curses, for example, and of “spells.” One woman, in the heat of “controversy,” was said to have uttered “a kind of prayer” against her neighbor that “neither he nor any of his family might prosper”; shortly thereafter, sickness did in fact overtake the neighbor’s household. Another man claimed “bewitchment” of his cow; another, injury to his horse; yet another, the sudden and mysterious death of some chickens. Several described experiences of being “ridden” like a beast of burden by supposed witches, over long distances and usually at night; one such left its victim “wearied nearly to death.” There were occasional references to the Devil’s “imps,” and also to shape-shifting. (For example, a witch suspect allegedly “rode” her neighbor here and there, then changed into a black cat and slipped away through a crack in the door.) There were also elaborate accounts of counter-magical activity. In one particularly vivid instance, a woman who “thought herself to be bewitched” ordered a servant “to take a horseshoe and fling it into the oven, and when it was red-hot to fling it into her . . . urine.” According to the servant, this tactic produced immediate, and telling, results: “So long as the horseshoe was hot, the witch [suspect] was sick at the heart, and when the iron was cold she was well again.”

  A much smaller group of cases involved the prosecution of witchcraft itself, not simply its link to defamation. There juries would be empaneled, witnesses deposed, defendants interrogated—all very much in line with traditional English legal practice. By the same token, a suspect’s body might be carefully examined by “ancient and knowing women,” in search of “teats, spots, and marks not usual on others.” (If found, these would be attributed to the Devil, and understood as an apparatus for suckling his imps.) The result of one such examination was recorded in detail: “She is like no other woman, having two things like teats on her private parts of a black color.” Moreover, a defendant’s house might be searched “for all images [witch dolls] and such like things as may strengthen the suspicion.” And at least a few suspected witches were ordered “to be tried in the water by ducking.” This time-tested method of “discovery” meant that the accused would be immersed in a pool or stream “above a man’s depth, to try how she swims therein.” If she floated too easily, the Devil was presumed to be at work on her behalf; if she sank, she could be exonerated. (And if she drowned? The records do not mention this possibility.)

  Just as Virginia was the first colonial site for court proceedings around witchcraft, so, too, was it among the last; trials occurred as late as 1706. Meanwhile, there were similar cases in adjacent Maryland. These, however, were fewer overall, and were entirely by way of slander. A typical instance involved a certain Peter Godson, when confronted by his neighbor Richard Manship as to “whether he would prove his [Manship’s] wife a witch.” According to testimony Godson then replied: “ ‘Take notice what I say. I came to your home, where your wife laid two straws [on the floor].’ And the woman in a jesting way said, ‘they say I am a witch; if I am a witch they say I have not the power to skip over these straws;’ and [she] bade the said Peter to skip over them. And about a day after[ward] the said Godson was lame, and thereupon would maintain Manship’s wife to be a witch.” This little scene nicely conveys the flavor of folk belief in regard to witchcraft: the laying of straws, the skipping over (another means of “discovering” witchcraft), the supposed link to maleficium. Godson would later retract his accusation, and the court case would be dismissed; but the residues of neighborhood animus may well have lingered.

  New York, another of the oldest colonies, witnessed occasional witchcraft cases (though not, apparently, during its initial, Dutch incarnation as New Netherland). A lengthy trial in 1665 charged a Long Island couple named Ralph and Mary Hall with using certain “detestable and wicked arts, commonly called witchcraft and sorcery,” to cause the illness and death of their neighbor George Wood and his infant child. In the end, however, there were no convictions. A jury found “some suspicions” of guilt in the woman, but not of sufficient “value to take away her life”; the man, for his part, was acquitted outright. Other, more casual imputations of witchcraft are scattered through New York records until the end of the 17th century, with a few rising to the level of legally actionable slander and one involving the banishment of a suspected witch who had moved in from nearby Connecticut.

  Witchcraft also surfaced periodically in the early Swedish and Finnish settlements on Delaware Bay. The records here are especially meager, but we do find mention of figures like “Lasse the Finn” and “Karin the Finnish woman,” both apparently imprisoned as witches in the Swedish fort at Christiana. Moreover, a Swedish “handbook” from the time, perhaps (though not provably) brought to the New World, beautifully suggests the manifold interactions between witchcraft, medicine, household routine, and folk culture. Here, in translation, are a few of its specific prescriptions:• A cross should be cut into a broom to prevent witches from riding on it.

  • A psalm-book should be placed below the head of the newly-born child to prevent its being exchanged for a changeling (or elf-child) by the evil spirits.

  • Bleeding is stopped by grasping around the sore with the hand and repeating the formula, “Thou shalt stand as firm as Jordan stood, when John baptized in the name of the Father, of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost.”

  • When a cow is sold a bunch of hair should be taken from her and preserved to prevent the good luck from leaving the house with the cow.

  • A little of each course from the Christmas table should be taken on Christmas morning and given to the cattle to preserve them against witchcraft.

  • If milk is accidentally spilled into the fire, salt should always be thrown in to avoid misfortunes.

  • If the spinning-wheel is kept going after 6 o’clock on Saturday evening, the sheep will not prosper.

  Pennsylvania’s founding came in 1682, relatively late; thus it had a briefer, more attenuated involvement with witchcraft. The Quakers, who made up by far the largest part of its population, seem not to have yielded any principals in such proceedings. Still, in 1684 the “proprietor” William Penn and his council conducted a full-blown prosecution of charges that had come from within the ranks of the colony’s Swedish minority. Two women, Margaret Mattson and Greta Hendrickson, stood accused of bewitching cows and practicing other “sorceries” over a span of at least 20 years. The jury returned an unusual sort of split verdict: “guilty of the common fame of a witch, but not guilty in manner and form as she stands indicted.” In 1701 a Philadelphia butcher and his wife were charged with slander for identifying a neighboring couple as the cause of a “very sudden illness . . .
[in] a certain strange woman lately arrived in this town”; the plaintiffs claimed as a result to be “suffering much in their reputation, and by that means in their trade.” (The “strange woman,” perhaps their lodger, had been found with “several pins . . . in her breasts,” and other seeming indicators of witchcraft.) The case, however, “being inquired into, and found trifling, was dismissed.”

  The word “trifling” jumps off the page here; it does not appear in any similar proceeding from the previous century. And, by this point, concern with witchcraft—at least official concern with witchcraft—was beginning to fade out almost everywhere. Indeed, in all these places outside New England, it had never amounted to a great deal. Certainly, it was part of local culture. And certainly it could for brief intervals, around particular persons, intensify considerably. But the sum of its effects was modest: no executions, no clear-cut findings of guilt, occasional prosecutions (and the majority of those for slander only, with the roles of accused witch and accusing victim turned around). This was, in fact, a mere shadow of what had obtained—and to some degree still obtained—in the Old World settings where all these colonists had originated.