Summary
Chapter 2: In Quest of Community, 1639-1687
Salem began as a commercial venture and prospered, outgrowing its original area. The Town selectman began granting land several miles in the interior, which soon became Salem Village.
Salem Village was not initially a distinct locale, and was initially called “Salem Farms” and its inhabitants the “Farmers.” It chafed under Salem Town’s power, which was becoming more mercantile and needed the Village for its tax revenues and food supply. The next century was filled with conflict between the Townsmen and the Farmers.
The Salem Farmers had no ecclesiastical apparatus, with no church, minister, or meetinghouse, and had to travel to the Town for religious services. They asked the Town for permission to have a minister of their own but were continually rebuffed, and began to feel like the Town was hostile to their interests. They eventually asked the Massachusetts General Court for permission to build their own meetinghouse, to which the Town refused initially but eventually agreed; they were also free from paying church taxes to the Town, but still had to pay the other taxes.
This did not mean the Village was independent; it would not be so until 1752. And even though they were allowed to have their own minister and meetinghouse, it did not mean they were a “church” the way Puritans understood it, as the church was an “elite cadre within the community, [that] met separately (usually after the congregation was dismissed) to partake in the privileged rite of communion” (42). Thus, the Village could build a church and hire a minister but they could not have church membership or give communion. This was clearly a subordinate status.
There was also a split within the Village itself. In 1690, the Village Committee, a five-member body elected to assess parish taxes, requested of the Town for Salem Village to become an independent township, but it was voted down. There were acrimonious relations with neighboring towns, and it seems like the Village was “not taken altogether seriously” (45).
Neighbors Against Neighbors
The Village’s experiences with several ministers resulted in stark divides. The first minister was the Reverend James Bayley of Newbury. Some in the Village thought his appointment procedure was irregular, and a significant minority turned against him. An appeal went to the Town and John Higginson, its minister, advised the dissidents to make their peace with Bayley. The Village Committee voted to dismiss him, so petitions were sent to the General Court. After debate and dissension, they agreed to let Bayley stay for one year and then revisit the matter.
Bayley himself was accused of neglecting church duties and not holding prayer in his household, but the real issue was a “broader debate over the nature and legitimacy of his appointment” (48). Who had the authority to call or dismiss a minister in the Village? It was clear that Salem Village was not a town, and it was not clear what statute or custom applied. The General Court did decide the whole body of inhabitants could call a minister, with approval from Salem Town and its church.
It is not known exactly what went wrong with Bayley, but clearly this small matter ballooned up to the government and the ecclesiastical apparatus. Factions fought, and when one took power, it could not easily enforce its will on the Village. The Village meeting, which had the power to elect the Committee, and the Committee itself were only “pallid shadows of the ‘town meeting’ and ‘Board of Selectmen’ which governed full-fledged towns” (50), and the Village’s affairs were mostly in the hands of the Town. Thus, even ordinary disputes were hard to settle.
Boyer and Nissenbaum find it odd that many attributed Salem Village’s problems to a moral, not institutional, source, for the institutional arrangements were odd and ineffective. Disputants had to reach outward for assistance, which often made things worse. Petty and personal disputes became linked to foundational ones.
Bayley eventually gave up and left in 1680, and an anti-Bayley group led by Nathaniel Putnam put out a call for a new minister to be chosen from among all the inhabitants. The choice was George Burroughs, but he also became persona non grata and stopped meeting his community by 1683. He met once more with the freeholders of the Village but was arrested for a debt issue. He was driven from the community and was later executed as a convicted wizard. The Burroughs affair saw the same pro-Bayley people as being pro-Burroughs, which showed “the basic factional divisions in Salem Village were hardening year by year” (56).
After Burroughs, the Village engaged Deodat Lawson in 1684. Things were peaceful at first but controversy broke out in 1686 because a group of Villagers wanted to establish a full-covenant church and ordain Lawson as its minister. The Village Committee, headed by the Putnams, supported this, while the Porters and two other men, Job Swinnerton and Joseph Hutchinson, were opposed. Hutchinson had given the Village some of his land for the meetinghouse and began to fence it off, which made the Committee bring suit against him.
Salem Town was against ordination because of the way it was managed. This ended the plan, but this affair showed that the church would not be a way to bring the Village together and “transcend the chronic divisions which plagued the community” (59).
Chapter 3: Afflicted Village, 1688-1697
A Church is Gathered
Three ministers had come and gone and Salem Village still did not have ecclesiastical autonomy, but the Villagers who wanted a full-fledged church and ordained minister pushed ahead.
During this time, the King of England and the governor of Massachusetts, Edmund Andros, were removed from office and there was a period of political confusion, opening up a possibility for the pro-ordination Villagers to act. They negotiated to hire Samuel Parris in June 1689, and then a few months later, the inhabitants voted to give Parris and his heirs the Village parsonage and two acres of land. This act, carried out primarily by the Putnams and their allies, seemed to contradict a Village ordinance, but Parris was ordained by the minister of Salem Town, Nicholas Noyes, in November of 1689. More Villagers joined the three members of the Village Committee who were pro-ordination to create the independent church, which Boyer and Nissenbaum see as “part of the broader strategy whose long-ranged goal was total separation from Salem Town” (63).
A movement for that total split gained steam but then faltered, the reasons why being somewhat unclear but rooted in people’s contradictory motives for that independence. The emerging anti-Parris coalition began to feel like they’d been manipulated.
The Church and its Enemies
Parris implicitly identified the Church’s, and his, enemies in a sermon. Two years later, the Parris supporters on the Committee were voted out and a new slate of men took their place. All five were of the anti-Parris faction in the Village, and in October of 1691 they immediately voted to not collect a tax for Parris’s salary.
Many inhabitants had not been paying the tax anyway, and church membership had stalled, yet it was unclear how this dramatic shift in power took place by 1691. The Village Record says nothing, but members of the pro-Parris group had been complaining of the anti-Parris Villagers “exploiting the problems of the Village” (67) and some stopped coming to Village meetings. Thus, the anti-Parris membership grew because the uncommitted and mildly pro-Parris went over to the anti-Parris side and the vaguely sympathetic to Parris stopped participating, allowing the anti-Parris faction to gain and hold power.
The elders of the Church demanded Parris be paid and the Committee said nothing, so the elders sued in the county court. The Village Committee responded by calling for a meeting to look at the legality of Parris’s hiring, but no one knows if this meeting took place or not.
The Book of Record was silent on these matters in 1692, engulfed in the Witch Trials. These Trials did not “generate the divisions within the Village, nor did it shift them in any fundamental way, but it laid bare the intensity with which they were experienced and heightened the vindictiveness with which they were expressed” (69).
After the crisis subsided, the pro-Parris faction claimed the Trials were another hurdle to provide for their minister and maintain their church. The meetinghouse had fallen into disrepair, and the pro-Parris faction revived its campaign to look into the “fraudulent” transference of ministry and land to Parris in 1689.
The court declared the Committee derelict in its duties and ordered the formation of a new committee, but it was just as anti-Parris. They did not institute a tax for his salary, and the local constables of Salem Town did nothing to interfere.
In 1693-1694, Parris’s opponents decided to push for the minister to call a council of outside ministers and laymen to look into the situation, hoping it would lead to Parris departing. Parris and his supporters intensely debated whether or not to call this council, and he eventually refused and dismissed their list of grievances against him as libel.
The dissenters then secured Villagers’ signatures to petition Governor William Phips and the General Court to appoint outside arbitrators. The minister and assistant ministers of Salem Town’s church, Noyes and John Higginson, as well as the minister from Beverly, wrote to Parris and asked him to call this council, claiming they spoke for the “Elders of Boston.” Parris was furious and deplored the methods used against him, but saw he was becoming an embarrassment. He delayed, however, in calling the council for another year and a half.
In November of 1693, Parris drew up his grievances against the dissenters, but the call for the council still did not come. In June of 1694, the Salem Town and Beverly ministers and others from Boston called for it again.
Parris and his supporters had one final tactic, confronting his opponents in the Salem Village meetinghouse on November 26, 1694. The entire congregation and church members witnessed him delivering a prayer and then reading the bill of grievances against him. He gave a lengthy response to this entitled “Meditations for Peace,” and was conciliatory and called for unity.
Boyer and Nissenbaum suggest that if just Parris himself was the problem, then perhaps this could have established him as a spiritual and moral leader of the community, but the “divisions in Salem Village went deeper than the personal behavior of one man, and one man’s eloquence was not enough to heal them” (73-74). The sides merely exchanged manifestos.
The council finally convened in April of 1695, and Increase Mather, the colony’s most respected clergyman, moderated. The seventeen religious dignities lectured the community on the divisions and eventually supported those who wished to rid themselves of Parris. They seemed to hint that if Parris would leave peacefully, they would help put a good face on the exit and help him find a new position.
The anti-Parris leaders were dissatisfied with this and sent a petition of eighty-four Villagers expressing their disappointment with the council’s decision. Mather and his colleagues took this seriously and said that it was necessary to remove Parris immediately. In response, a pro-Parris petition was circulated. Suffield, at the likely urging of Boston, invited Parris to be its minister, but the Village church elders refused and Parris said blatantly that he would remain.
The Departure of Parris
Parris’s confidence came from the fact that his backers had just taken back control of the Village Committee. It is impossible to say how this happened, but perhaps the same way the anti-Parris side took over in years past happened for the pro-Parris side. However, the victory was hollow; the constables would still not collect the tax. Parris saw his position as untenable, and notified the elders in April of 1696 that he would see out the rest of his appointment until it expired in July. The church began to look for a successor.
Parris had received no or only a partial salary for years, but still held the deed to the parsonage and acres of land. The Committee sued him, lost, and Parris won a countersuit against the Village for back salary. The Committee appealed. Both sides agreed to arbitration, and Parris surrendered the deed and received some back pay. Eventually Parris moved on to secular pursuits.
It seems there was a concerted effort to give voice to all factions when looking for Parris’s successor. The choice of Reverend Joseph Green was not one that brought about full reconciliation, but it at least acknowledged that such sources of diversity and division could never be fully quelled.
Analysis
In these two chapters, Boyer and Nissenbaum explore the geographic situation of Salem Village as well as the controversies surrounding the establishment of a church and the ordination of a minister. Neal Salisbury sums up their task: “Salem Village, where the drama was centered, was first settled in the 1630's. From the beginning the Village was distinct from the older Salem Town, but politically and religiously subordinate to it. While the Town grew into a flourishing port, the Village remained an isolated, but increasingly crowded, series of farms. Repeated attempts to obtain autonomy were rejected by the Town and the Massachusetts Bay General Court with the imputation that The Villagers were a restless, contentious lot. The three institutions which provided for community identity in New England-town meeting, selectmen and church-all lacked autonomous power in the Village. Without these institutional restraints, disputes quickly escalated to bitter factionalism in which various groups sought to speak for the Village as a whole. In time two leading factions coalesced around a series of issues, particularly the Village's relationship with the Town.”
The most important thing to note here is that Salem Village essentially began as an offshoot of the more prosperous and prominent Salem Town, and its history was one characterized by repeated calls for and rebuffs of independence. Resentment and frustration simmered, and “One gets the distinct sense that in its early years Salem Village was not taken altogether seriously” (45). As they did not have a church of their own initially, Villagers had to travel to church in the Town and contribute from their taxes to said church and the minister’s salary. The Town was several miles away physically, but symbolically it was much further. It was modernizing quickly, moving into commerce and away from agriculture. The Village was important to the Town, then, because it “increased her tax revenues…[and] provided the food which the Town could not supply” (39).
Philip J. Greven, Jr. explains that “For at least two decades prior to 1692, evidence of internal disputes abounded. In part, these arose from the lack of viable institutions within the Village, which did not have (until 1689) a church or a town government of its own, other than a small committee elected by the villagers to oversee the collection of taxes in support of the ministry. None of these institutions sufficed for the resolution of differences among the villagers.” The Town finally did allow the Village to begin a church of their own, but crucially, they initially only allowed them to build a meetinghouse and did not allow them to ordain a minister. The historians write that “This subordinate status was reflected in a variety of subtle ways—including even gestures of goodwill. The pulpit and the deacons’ bench in the Village meetinghouse, for example, were second-hand pieces passed on by Salem Town when the Town built its new meetinghouse in the early 1670’s.”
James Bayley, George Burroughs, and Deodat Lawson were all unordained, and it was not until Samuel Parris came that ordination was achieved. The historians chronicle these four men’s stories, covering what brought them to Salem, how they were chosen, the troubles that beset them during their tenure as minister, and what sort of tensions their presence created and brought into the light.
A few things were revealed: first, there was a question as to who “had the authority to call or dismiss a minister in Salem Village?” (48), and it was unclear “what statue or custom actually applied” (49) in such cases; second, all Village institutions were “practically useless as instruments for the resolution of differences” (50), rendering the Village “almost helpless in coping with whatever disputes might arise” (51); third, Villagers had to turn to outside authorities for help, and those authorities “unable to be of much real assistance, often only made matters worse by trying to shame the Villagers into accepting personal moral responsibility for their troubles” (52); and four, the move toward ecclesiastical independence from the Town was a fraught subject and the negotiations with the ministers, especially Samuel Parris, made divisions in the Village much more pronounced.
