Summary
Chapter 6: Joseph and His Brothers: A Story of the Putnam Family
Joseph Putnam was born to Thomas Putnam, Sr., the eldest son of John Putnam. Thomas married Ann Holyoke in 1643 and had eight children by her, two of whom were male. Thomas Jr. was one of these, and he looked forward to becoming one of the most exalted men in the town, even as he probably saw that the family land was remote from the Town and was being increasingly divided. He tried to diversify in his marriage, marrying Ann Carr, a daughter of George Carr, a wealthy merchant in Salisbury. But after Carr died, to Thomas’s chagrin most of his property went to his two Carr sons.
Thomas must have also been disappointed when his father married again after Ann Holyoke died. He married Mary Veren, a woman of Salem Town who had some property of her own. They had Joseph Putnam, Jr., who would soon supplant Thomas Jr. in his father’s esteem. When Thomas Sr. died, he left the biggest part of his estate to Mary and Joseph, giving Thomas and the rest of the siblings only some of it. Perhaps he thought he was being fair, as he had already set up Thomas and Edward on farms of their own.
Yet Thomas Jr. and Edward were furious, deeply aggrieved, and suspicious about the process. Joseph was now one of the richest men in Salem Village, and he chose to marry in the one family richer and more prestigious than his own—the Porters. He married Elizabeth Porter in 1690 when he was twenty years old. It was not long after that he began to amass more political power, and joined forces with Daniel Andrew and his kinsman Joseph Porter.
Joseph and his wife were the only two Putnams to sign the anti-Parris petition of 1695, and Joseph worked behind the scenes with his father-in-law Israel against Parris.
The final blow was when Mary Veren Putnam died, as she left everything to Joseph Jr. and practically cut all the stepchildren off. Thomas Jr., Edward, and their brother-in-law Jonathan Walcott revived the earlier court challenge and demanded a full investigation into the circumstances of the drawing up of the will.
Testimonies were gathered and fell along predictable lines. One of the servant girls, Abigail Farling, stated that Israel Porter was often at Mary’s bedside, urging her to draw up a will. It is possible he had been biding his time and saw this moment as an opportune one. But even though this seemed damning for him, in deposition Israel was as cool as ever, and “offered his own terse versions of the circumstances leading up to the signing of the will” (141). Ultimately, the will was held up, and Joseph Putnam, who was seen as a Putnam in name only, was confirmed as the family’s leading figure in the third generation.
Stepmothers and Witches
Boyer and Nissenbaum explain how, by the 1690s, Thomas Jr. and his siblings were ready to see that what was happening to them was rooted in witchcraft.
They did not attack a single individual, and did not directly go after Mary Veren Putnam or Joseph Putnam. This may have been because they were too powerful, or perhaps that they were still part of the family regardless of the trouble. Who they did target were proxies—older women like Mary Veren. There was Martha Cory, a woman with “respectability but a touch of deviance” (147), and Rebecca Nurse, a respected older woman. Ann Putnam, Thomas Jr.’s wife, claimed Rebecca Nurse visited her and afflicted her terribly. She was an ideal substitute for Veren, but there were also real reasons why Nurse was obnoxious to the Putnams, as the Nurses had been claiming some of the Putnam lands actually belonged to another town, Topsfield, instead of Salem Village.
Boyer and Nissenbaum end the chapter by claiming to understand Thomas Jr.’s family is to understand Salem Village, with its thin line between private and public concerns. The family wove its personal issues into a “comprehensive vision of conspiracy against Salem Village as a whole” (151).
Chapter 7: Samuel Parris: A Pilgrim in Bethlehem
Samuel Parris came to Salem Village, which he said in a sermon had virtually lain under a curse for not having an established church. He brought a message of hope and a new beginning, which also was a message for himself. He had had many setbacks and frustrations in his young life, and saw Salem Village as an opportunity to settle down.
Parris was born in England to a father who was a merchant and had interests in commerce and real estate in Ireland and Barbados. As a younger son, Samuel only received land in Barbados, twenty acres that was damaged by a hurricane. He decided to go to Massachusetts instead. Commerce was his first choice, but he was not successful and soon turned to the ministry.
The inhabitants of Salem set up a three-man committee to negotiate with him to become their minister. He preached a sample sermon and the congregation decided to invite him. Yet he did not respond for months, and may have been wondering if this was the place to commit himself to. The committee offered him the position more firmly, and he responded with a detailed set of revisions and expectations. The Village spokesman accepted all of the points, but it seems as if information about Parris’s demands trickled down into the community and was starting to sow resentment.
Questions arose over who should be included in the tax rolls for Parris’s salary. The contract was concluded, but there was a discrepancy between what Parris thought had been concluded and what actually was in there in terms of salary issues. It is unknown why this went awry, but what is clear is that Parris started the abrasive negotiations and “having suffered the erosion of goodwill which they entailed… neglected at the crucial moment to secure a binding written agreement!” (159).
Before he learned about the misunderstanding, though, Parris was pleased with the arrangements. He did have the audacity, though, to demand the Village deed to the parsonage property for himself and his heirs outright. The Village acquiesced, and the agreement was settled.
Parris assumed his new role, seeing it as the chance to “release him from the nagging and demeaning concerns which had made such a shambles of the first half of his life” (160). These hopes did not pan out for many reasons. Village factionalism intensified in the 1690s. Parris fought ruthlessly against those he thought were “responsible for his economic embarrassment” (161), and reverted to old habits. His sermons were increasingly idiosyncratic, rooted in the obsessions over commerce and money and trade that had so characterized much of his life. He also showed exaggerated concerns for honor, dignity, and respect, stewing in his anger that his opponents apparently lacked such characteristics. He cared deeply about the tone of social encounters, and his sermons alluded to his concerns by developing “the idea that the obscure inhabitants of obscure villages are at the mercy of more cosmopolitan interests and authorities who do not have their interests at heart” (165-66).
For many decades, historians have written about Parris as someone who came to a brief bout of power during an unstable time, but who then became an outcast pariah as the good sense of the people manifested itself. Yet this is not the whole story, as the bonds between Parris and the Village were complex. Many of his sermons struck a chord with Villagers. He “exalted the supposed virtues of a precapitalist society” and “did his best to get ahead in a fluid and shifting economic situation” (167).
Samuel Parris and the Witchcraft Episode: From Eden to Gethsemane
Parris’s sermons offer a lot of insight into what is going on in the community and how Parris feels about it. First, he offered hopeful glimpses of the community as a peaceful refuge with the church at its center. Then, he began to speak of subversion and betrayal, hostility from within and without. Over time, he even insinuated he was like Christ and his enemies were like Judas. He also connected the problems to “actual, conscious collaboration between individual human beings and the powers of Satan” (170).
When it became clear the Village was not a bastion of peace, he focused on the church being such a place. It was less a brotherhood of saints in his view and more a refuge from devils and their human cohorts. The imagery “took on a more and more martial cast” (171).
Parris saw the witchcraft episode as evidence of Satan’s growing power, but in his sermons also connected them to the economic source of the power through the “pervasiveness of lust” (172), meaning greed and desire for worldly things. For him, “witchcraft, deceit, and money hunger were but the varied manifestations of the single diabolical menace which now openly confronted Salem Village” (173).
For many months during the Trials, Parris did not write out his sermons in the Book he used, and the “loose pages” he referred to have been lost. However, we do know that as the Trials reached their crescendo and then a counterresponse set in, and it was clear that the Village was not “perceptibly soothed in either its physical or its political afflictions” (174), Parris tried to rally his people. His own fortunes were falling, and he turned his words to the world beyond, not the sublunary one. The Village Church was no longer a refuge for him. There would be no reconciliation or expiation, and he came to believe what John Calvin had always said—humans were corrupt to their very core.
Boyer and Nissenbaum conclude this chapter by acknowledging that Parris did not provoke the Witch Trials and did not create the factional tensions that underlay them, but he had a crucial role. From the pulpit each week he “took the nagging fears and conflicting impulses of his hearers and wove them into a pattern overwhelming in its scope, a universal drama in which Christ and Satan, Heaven and Hell, struggled for supremacy” (177).
Parris was a representative of his time, a time when “a subsistence, peasant-based economy was being subverted by mercantile capitalism” (178). In his sermons, his parishioners found ways to explain how they were feeling and what was happening, and through his time in the Village, Parris found a way to give in to his gnawing obsessions.
Analysis
One of Boyer and Nissenbaum’s most compelling—and sometimes controversial—theories is that while the tensions between the families were elevated, it was not socially acceptable to attack some of the more prominent Villagers but rather the young accusers went after “proxies.” For example, Mary Veren Putnam was a source of frustration to her stepsons and their families, but Ann Putnam did not accuse her. They write, “Whatever the reason, it seems clear that the Putnams in 1692 (like Hansel and Gretel in the folk tale) projected their bitterness—onto persons who were, politically or psychologically, less threatening targets” (145), and against these older women like Rebecca Nurse, “they vented the rage and bitterness which they were forced to deny (or channel through such stylized outlets as legal petitions) in their relations with Mary and Joseph” (146). In this section, they also utilize the myths and fairy tales about evil stepmothers, such as Hansel and Gretel and Cinderella, to make their case that the stepmother—Mary Veren—was a witch-like figure.
To their credit, Boyer and Nissenbaum make potent connections between these stories and the grievances suffered by Thomas, Jr. and Edward Putnam, and, by extension, their children. Yet there is something a little fanciful here, especially when juxtaposed with the very straightforward, data-driven conclusions elsewhere in Salem Possessed. Langdon Wright states, “And their assertion that the afflicted girls ‘projected’ their anxieties onto ‘substitutes’ because they could not attack the Porter family directly is unproven, and not even buttressed by citations of works on psychology.”
William T. Hagan also suggests caution: “The guilt of each sort was projected on others who became the victims in the outbreak of witchcraft… The evidence for these intriguing explanations does not exist and perhaps could not. There is little evidence of inner states of mind, though broad social dispositions may be induced from the evidence of behavior. There are virtually no private papers-diaries or letters, for example-which might provide a basis for these speculations. Boyer and Nissenbaum, in the absence of such data, have forced too much from the limited evidence at their disposal. In the process they are betrayed into psychological reductionism.”
The next chapter is on Samuel Parris, one of the most famous (or infamous) figures in the Trials. The controversial minister of the Salem Village Church, it was his daughter who was the first accuser, and it was he who zealously pursued the accusations, convictions, and executions of witches. The historians ably dissect Parris’s particular obsessions, concerns, and resentments, revealing how, for example, through his sermons he was revealing his own complicated history with money and commerce. They establish how he was excessively focused on “honor, dignity, and respect” (163) at the same time as he was trying to elevate himself; he did his best to “get ahead in a fluid and shifting economic situation, yet he even more strenuously repudiated such behavior, lashing out at those who were more successful at it than himself, reducing complex social structures to the moral failings of individuals” (167). Parris’s sermons leading up to the Trials showcase how he was bringing together “witchcraft, deceit, and money hunger” as the “varied manifestations of the single diabolical menace which now openly confronted Salem Village” (173).
Philip J. Greven, Jr. finds much to laud in the Parris chapter, but offers a brief comment of skepticism: “Boyer and Nissenbaum explore the social and psychological dimensions of the life and thought of the Reverend Parris, whose role in the entire witchcraft episode, like that of the Putnams', was 'crucial'…Their chapter on Parris reflects impressive insight into the personal implications of Parris's public sermons and dissects, persuasively, the personal ‘obsessions’ of Parris… Having explored the underlying social and psychological themes in Parris's manuscript sermons (which obviously merit even more extensive analysis), Boyer and Nissenbaum conclude their chapter with the assertion that they 'are not dealing... simply with the psychopathology of a single eccentric individual. Parris was ultimately a representative man of his time, just as Salem Village was a representative community' (p. 178). Perhaps, in this instance, Boyer and Nissenbaum overextend themselves.”
