The Enemy Within Page 23
Seen in full context, then, the trials constituted a kind of backlash phenomenon, an effort by the traditionalists to forestall and to punish the “evil” forces of change pushing outward toward the far corners of the Village from the Town. In Boyer and Nissenbaum’s own words, the witch-hunt reflected (and was greatly energized by) one of the “central issues of New England society in the late seventeenth century: the resistance of back-country farmers to the pressures of commercial capitalism, and the social style that accompanied it.” To be sure, such folk were themselves of divided mind—both attracted to, and repelled by, the “pressures” at hand. In this, they “were part of a vast company, on both sides of the Atlantic, trying to expunge the lure of a new order from their own souls by doing battle with it in the real world.” Presumably, the goal was misguided, the effort futile, and the results (at least for Salem) devastating. But Boyer and Nissenbaum were not inclined to condemn; instead, they described feelings of “real sympathy” for the beleaguered Villagers. Here they made a connection to their personal experience of “living through the 1960s, the decade of Watts and Vietnam,” and thus coming to realize “that the sometimes violent roles men play in ‘history’ are not necessarily a measure of their personal decency or lack of it.” Not for the first time, or the last, did a retelling of the Salem story find echoes in the teller’s own present.
In sum, Salem Possessed offered much more than a new answer to the familiar question of what caused the witch trials. As the authors put it in a startling bit of metaphor, “We have . . . exploited the focal events of 1692 somewhat as a stranger might make use of a lightning flash in the night: better to observe the contours of the landscape which it chances to illuminate.” The landscape thus observed was broad, deep, and hugely significant: nothing less than the approach of the modern era.
In the 30-odd years since the time of its publication, Salem Possessed has faced a number of scholarly challenges, most recently on empirical grounds. Its portrayal of the two warring Village factions may be overdrawn; reinvestigation and reanalysis of some parts are still ongoing. Nonetheless, it remains the single most influential paradigm we have for understanding the Salem witch trials—not to mention its portentous “lightning flash” revelations.
Salemwitchcraft as “acid” trip
Now the publishing floodgates opened wide; since 1974 books and articles on Salem witchcraft have poured forth at such a rate that only a portion of them can be noticed here. One conspicuous example—sufficiently conspicuous that it would find its way onto the front page of some newspapers—first appeared in the journal Science, in 1976, under the title “Ergotism: The Satan Loosed in Salem.” The author was a young biologist named Linnda R. Caporael. The argument was drawn from clinical pharmacology. And the inspiration (or so one might speculate) was a rising public fascination with hallucinogenic drugs.
It was Caporael’s basic contention that “the physical symptoms of the afflicted and many of the other accusers are those induced by convulsive ergot poisoning.” Ergot, she explained, is a fungus containing “powerful pharmacologic agents.” (In fact, it bears a close relation to lysergic acid diethylamide, also known as LSD or in street parlance, simply, acid.) Its usual hosts are cereal grains, most especially rye, from which it may eventually be carried into baked breads. It grows under many conditions of soil and climate, but dampness and warmth suit it best. The matchup with Salem and the witch trials, Caporael argued, was exceedingly close. The spring and summer of 1691 had been mild and rainy. Lots of rye had been grown in the Village fields. Harvesting would have occurred in the late fall, with baking and eating of ergotized bread following soon thereafter; the witch-hunt started up just a short while after that. Moreover, details of the fits in the core accusers—“convulsions” and all the rest—closely tracked the clinical picture for ergotism. Presto! A longtime mystery solved by medical science.
It seemed almost too good to be true. And, in fact, it was. Barely six months later, another issue of Science contained another article presenting a point-by-point refutation. According to the authors of this second piece, a pair of psychologists named Nicholas P. Spanos and Jack Gottlieb, the “general features . . . of ergotism” and “the events that occurred at Salem” did not make for such a good fit, after all. Prominent among the “features” they listed were vomiting, diarrhea, a “livid” skin color, “contractures of the extremities,” and a ravenous appetite—none of which appeared, to any significant degree, in contemporaneous accounts from the trials. Moreover, the timing was off, since many of the accusers became “afflicted” only in the late spring. Finally, the spread of accusations beyond Salem to numerous other communities would seem to have required “a concurrent spread of ergotized rye”; and for this, there was no plausible evidence at all.
Surprisingly, a new round of claims for ergotism began several years later (1982), with the publication of yet another article by another author. Mary K. Mattosian resuscitated Caporael’s argument, with some modest reshuffling (for example, cold weather, rather than warm, was now deemed essential) and with the Spanos-Gottlieb “objection” ruled “not as valid as originally perceived.” Mattosian would subsequently extend the same theory to a vast range of historical events, in a book fetchingly entitled Poisons of the Past (1997). But by then the culture had changed; LSD was passé, and witchcraft study had moved on.
Salemwitchcraft and other witchcraft
Indeed, the 1980s brought a different direction entirely. Perhaps because the Boyer-Nissenbaum model proved so powerful an explanation of the Salem affair, historians shifted their attention toward earlier New England trials. The new goal was to unravel a general “system” of witchcraft belief (and of behavior based on such belief ).
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 Engla
nd 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.”