Summary
Prologue
In the prologue, Boyer and Nissenbaum begin with the Trials themselves, accounting for the panic and how it all spiraled out of control. The daughter of Samuel Parris, the local minister, was one of the first afflicted, but neither he nor the local physician could figure out what was happening. Rumors spread, and for awhile no legal action was taken. The girls eventually named their tormentors—Sarah Good, Sarah Osborne, and Tituba. The women were jailed but the girls’ bizarre behavior continued. A former minister, Deodat Lawson, visited the town and also had no insights. More adults and children fell victim to the spell, and Martha Cory was arrested next.
The deputy governor, six magistrates, and a large assembly gathered in Salem Town. The prisons were overflowing but no trials were held yet, as Massachusetts technically did not have a legally established government since its form had been abrogated by the English authorities. A new governor, William Phips, was eventually appointed, but he and the new charter were not present yet. The authorities still had no official recourse except to throw people in jail without a trial.
Phips arrived in May of 1692 and convened a Court of Oyer and Terminer to address the backlog of witch cases. The hangings began, and did not end until September of that year when nineteen people had been hanged.
By late September, there were still 100 suspected witches in jail and accusations and arrests still happening. What brought the crisis to an end was “the direct and organized intervention of the principal ministers of eastern Massachusetts” (9). They began levying pressure and finally acted by October under the leadership of Increase Mather, an extremely influential leader in the colony.
The ministers undertook a discussion of what constituted admissible evidence in witchcraft cases, which was notoriously difficult to address. The indictments rested on humans who were afflicted by intangible spirits, but it was the humans who made compacts with the devil.
The magistrates tried to seek out real proof that corresponded to courtroom laws. Confession was the best form of evidence, especially when corroborated by others. Behind that was “trustworthy testimony to some supernatural attribute of the accused” (12) and then “certain compensating supernatural weaknesses believed to characterize a witch” (12). Yet another form was a certain physical deformity like a “witch’s tit.” Sometimes the evidence admitted was the accused’s anger and then some misfortune befalling the victim. This was flawed, and Increase Mather recognized that fact. Another problematic form of evidence was the gathering together of the girls in the courtroom to see what happened to them when presented with the accused, and though later this would discredit the Trials, this was “rooted in the magistrates’ determination to accept only evidence which they could verify or which in this instance, they could observe with their own eyes” (16). Mather rejected such tests, saying they involved dangerous toying with power and could too easily fall to deception and fakery.
The final category of evidence was spectral evidence, but such evidence was troubling. The devil could appear in the form of an innocent or godly person, and it was almost impossible to verify. Though this evidence was included in the dossiers, it was considered somewhat suspect.
Boyer and Nissenbaum write that what emerges from the look at the record is the “sense of a society, confronted with a tenacious outbreak of a particularly baffling crime at a time of severe political and legal disruption, nevertheless striving, in an equitable way, to administer justice and restore order” (19).
Phips told the Privy Council on October 12 that he was forbidding any more imprisonment or trials for witchcraft, and soon dissolved the Court of Oyer and Terminer. A new court was convened the next year to deal with the rest of the cases, and Phips proclaimed no one could be convicted by spectral evidence. Three more people were convicted but Phips reprieved them.
The Trials were over, but have long endured in the minds of Americans. How did this happen, and why did the Trials go on and on? Boyer and Nissenbaum claim that something was different about Salem Village in 1692, and their work endeavors to explain what that is.
Chapter 1: 1692: Some New Perspectives
In the contemporary moment, the Trials seem almost foreordained, but there are other ways things could have played out, especially as there was a month between the first glimpses of strange behavior from the girls and the first accusations.
Bewitchment and Conversion
It is possible that the finger of accusation could have been turned back on the girls; why were they not chastised for their behavior? The behavior was not unpleasant or dangerous at first, after all, but it was the adults that brought in witchcraft; Samuel Parris and his parishioners could have put a different spin on things, but they did not.
Similar afflictions happened to another young girl, Mercy Short, miles away from Salem Village. Everyone agreed she was bewitched, but her minister, Cotton Mather, directed people not towards accusations but toward “religious edification of the community” (25).
This incident and Salem could have presaged a religious revival as early as the 1690s, attributing the girls’ visitations to the divine rather than the demonic. The girls’ fits looked like those of sinners in turmoil, after all, and perhaps a focus on religious awakening would have changed things. In 1735, there was the “Little Awakening,” as scholars refer to it as, in Northampton, Massachusetts, which also began with intense anxiety and visitations of young women, but ended not with executions but with suicide. Like in Salem, the young took the lead, breaking out of their deferential role and becoming de facto leaders of the town and moral authority figures. The minister here, Jonathan Edwards, also encouraged and exploited the young people’s behavior, turning a “potentially damaging situation to their own benefit” (29) but found himself dismissed a few years later just like Parris. Overall, though, Northampton experienced a religious revival, not a witchcraft outbreak. Edwards saw the phenomena as divine, and the whole situation presaged the Great Awakening, not a repeat of Salem. Thus, it matters what adults read into the situations before them.
Some Patterns of Accusation
Pace: The pattern of accusations proceeded very slowly and then spread up demonstrably in April and May.
Status: The first women accused were “deviants” or “outcasts” from their community, but as time passed, those accused also included wives of prosperous freeholders and many prominent people. None of them were brought to trial or executed, but the Trials were not “a communal effort to purge the poor, the deviant, or the outcast” (33).
Geography: The accusations began in Salem Village and gradually expanded outward. The girls did not actually know most of the people they named; accusers and accused were not in the same circles. What was happening was something deeper than “chronic, petty squabbles between near neighbors” (33).
However, geography does matter quite profoundly: fourteen of the accused witches lived within Salem Village, and twelve in the eastern part. Of the thirty-two adult villagers who testified against them, only two were from the eastern side and the other thirty were from the western. There were twenty-nine villagers who were skeptical or defended the accused witches, with only five from the western side.
Analysis
There is a formidable body of work on the Salem Witch Trials full of innumerable theories as to how this situation spiraled into insanity. One of the most important works published on the subject is Salem Possessed, a skillful work of social history that, through the study of court records, deeds, petitions and voting rolls, tax documents, and more tells a story of how a community fractured by economic changes, social class tensions, and familial factions allowed such a devastating series of events to occur. Roger Thompson lauds it as “a fine piece of social historical investigation” and an “Imaginative yet rigorous investigation of local records” in “the forefront of that growing collection of local histories which have revolutionized the study of American colonial history in the last decade.” It is solidly rooted in regular people’s lives, especially in the quotidian aspects of those lives, and there are few mentions of gender, Native Americans, and mind-altering rye bread: the main thesis is that the swift change from a pre-capitalist society to a mercantile one was profoundly destabilizing to many people, and that allowed for, and prolonged, the persecutions and hysteria.
M. Barbara Akin lays out what the historians do in this foundational work: “Starting with the trials, they gradually broaden their study to discuss geographical, economic and social considerations. Each chapter logically and easily flows from the one preceding. (Indeed, just as the reader begins to ask questions of the text, the authors take them up themselves.) The plot unfolds almost as a mystery story and the reader is tantalized to keep reading and discovering, the authors skillfully combining [sic] documentation, inference and insight.” Salem Possessed begins with an account of the Trials, starting with the accusations from the young girls and ending with the trials and execution sentences. They account for how the civil authorities eventually got involved, but how that was complicated by the fact that the colonial and royal authorities were experiencing flux of their own. They also explain how it was actually nearby ministers who started to question the way the trials were being conducted. Through looking at the different types of testimony and evidence being proffered and casting a wary eye upon certain forms, they helped bring the Trials to a (comparably) fairer place.
In Chapter 1, Boyer and Nissenbaum assert that “the whole affair has taken on a preordained quality. It is hard to conceive that the events of 1692 could have gone in any other direction or led to any other outcome” (23). They suggest a few points to consider before delving into their argument, such as the fact that “the finger of witchcraft could have been pointed back at the afflicted girls themselves” (23) but was not, and that it is possible that the Villagers could have “chosen to place a different interpretation on it” (24).
For instance, Cotton Mather, when faced with a similar situation in a neighboring area, “treated it not as an occasion for securing witchcraft accusation but as an opportunity for the religious edification of the community” (25). In Northampton, Jonathan Edwards did the same thing in the 1730s, and what is clear from both his and Mather’s behavior is that “by encouraging and even exploiting the unusual behavior of the young people in their communities, both ministers had managed to turn a potentially damaging situation to their own benefit” (29). In Salem, though, Reverend Samuel Parris and his supporters were convinced that what was happening was demonic, not divine. These adults read into the accusations “their own concerns and expectations” (30), deciding that something evil was afoot.
Boyer and Nissenbaum explain that they are going to paint a portrait of the Village in order to figure out why this happened as it did. They begin with the witchcraft accusations themselves, identifying certain patterns in the several hundred people accused and in the manner in which those accusations occurred. While the first few women could be considered “deviants” or outsiders, “by the end of the summer some of the most prominent people in Massachusetts and their close kin had been accused if not officially charged” (32). This is an important corrective to the prevailing assumption that all the people accused were poor or problematic to the community somehow. “Whatever else they might have been, the Salem witch trials cannot be written off as a communal effort to purge the poor, the deviant, or the outcast” (33). They also note how there was an increasingly wide orbit of accusations, and that the accusers did not often know the accused well, if at all. Petty neighborhood quarrels were not the root of the problem.
Another clear pattern is that the accusers and accused tended to live on opposite sides of the Village, and this chapter ends with the historians saying that they plan to look at the Village on the eve of the Trials to figure out how these established trends in who and where hint can provide a way for us to “hope to understand 1692” (36).
