Satan in Salem
DRAPER, ROGER
Writers &Writi ng SATAN IN SALEM BY ROGER DRAPER EVERY NATION has its own catalog of sin, and in ours a prominent place belongs to the Salem witch craze of 1692, the subject of Peter Charles...
...Then events took an extremely unusual turn: The girls started pointing the finger at respectable villagers, and finally at men and women in the colony's highest circles...
...Like several other authors of recent books on the craze...
...As the author speculates, the senior Putnams may have "encouraged the girls" to shift their accusations from local oddballs to men and women associated with the Porters—several of whom were hanged as witches in 1692...
...The future belonged to Roger Williams, the minister banished from Massachusetts in the 1630s for rejecting its Established Church, not to John Win-throp, the Puritan governor who expelled him...
...Yet there really was such a thing as witchcraft— namely, magic...
...And it is true that while the craze started outside this framework, it was quickly, as Hoffer notes, absorbed by it...
...Traditional magic had two faces: white (love potions, for example) and its malevolent counterpart, black...
...As in Marx (who is not explicitly invoked by Hoffer...
...Mercy Lewis, his servant...
...It has always been apparent that, taken as a whole, the hundreds of supposed witches were significantly better off than their tormentors, the Putnams aside...
...Writers &Writi ng SATAN IN SALEM BY ROGER DRAPER EVERY NATION has its own catalog of sin, and in ours a prominent place belongs to the Salem witch craze of 1692, the subject of Peter Charles Hoffer's The Devil's Disciples (Johns Hopkins, 279 pp...
...Perhaps we can see intimations of the later developments in the falling off during the early 1690s of applications for full church membership throughout the colony, in the refusal of the Porters' allies to take communion in 1692, and in the increasing skepticism toward the witch craze expressed by several Congregational clergymen as it wore on...
...The petition that called upon Salem Town to let the village secede, for instance, pointed not to different visions of the future (let alone modes of production) but to the five to 10 miles separating the town and the village...
...Yet among God's elect in Massachusetts, they led to the execution of 20 people and to the deaths of several more (one of them an infant) in prison...
...a number were simply permitted to flee...
...for all we know, she might have gone the whole nine yards, black magic included...
...MUCH HAS BEEN read into this remarkably vicious struggle in a rural settlement on the westernmost fringe of the European world...
...Five years after the madness ended, Robert Calef, a Boston merchant outraged by the trials, claimed that Phips finally called them off upon learning that his own wife had been accused of serving the Evil One...
...The first two incumbents departed in the wake of squabbles that were not related to subsequent happenings...
...by the late 17th century, judges in the Old World usually booted charges of bewitchment out of court...
...In any case, there is no doubt that revulsion against it helped undermine old-fashioned Puritan sectarianism...
...In the 1670s...
...The witchcraft craze thus started prior to the emergence of Protestant churches...
...Whatever the actual role of the Porters in the transformation, they were precisely the sort of people who brought it about, and the farmers of Salem Village were typical of those opposing it...
...By 1720, a generation after the craze, Congregationalism in Massachusetts had moved far down the road that in the early 19th century would lead its oldest and most important congregations to defect to Unitarianism...
...Although historians are constantly warned against the Whig Theory of History—interpreting the past as though it were the present going on at another time—this slant adds something of value to the book, for there is a genuine analogy between the Salem witch hunt and the recovered memory cases that fill today's newspapers...
...His successor in 1689 was Samuel Parris, whose daughter Betty would raise the earliest charges of witchcraft during a persistent and unexplained illness...
...Ann Putnam, the daughter of Parris' champion Thomas Putnam...
...Soon, so did her cousin Abigail Williams, a servant in the household...
...The commerce of New England and its conquest of the frontier, though, progressed hand in hand...
...Clearly, the targets of the craze changed when it merged with an ongoing political struggle in Salem...
...The girls and the early objects of their delusion lived in Salem Village, a mostly rural ward of Salem that is now the city of Danvers...
...Other than its very late date, the affair was quite typical: Bridget Bishop, the alleged witch, was a marginal member of the community, and her accusers (the girls) were also female...
...Now, it is true that politics in Salem Village revolved around the struggle between its leading families, and that the Porters had stronger mercantile connections than the Putnams...
...in those then remote places it may well have represented the last resort of an ancient paganism that had never been fully stamped out...
...To the southeast lay the wards of Salem Town, the original center of Salem and a port led by a merchant elite...
...and Governor William Phips, who authorized the trials to calm public opinion...
...But elsewhere, and perhaps even there, most witches and wizards must have regarded themselves as Christians...
...For reasons that have not been explained satisfactorily by Hoffer or anyone else, this started changing around 1450...
...Of course, the kind of conflict Hoffer speaks of might have been real even if it became obvious only later...
...Parris had studied at Harvard and tried his hand at commerce in Barbados (where he had spent most of his childhood) and Boston before deciding in the mid-1680s to enter the Congregational ministry...
...they led a campaign to make the village into a separate municipality...
...It is far from certain, for example, what Betty Parris told her parents, or how they and the Putnams transformed her statements into formal charges of diabolical possession...
...This rash, emotional man exacerbated rather than soothed the old wounds...
...Although the town refused to go along (separation didn't actually occur until 1775), the village was permitted to open a Congregational Meeting House in 1672...
...Mary Walcott, Putnam's niece...
...From the start, the Putnams chose its minister...
...the latter "looked to the east [Salem Town] and commerce...
...The wealthiest of its families, the Porters, had strong marital and business ties to Salem Town...
...most of the clergymen of the colony's Congregational Church, established by law until 1830...
...Hoffer presents it as an episode in an ongoing class war pitting the poorer farmers, led by the Putnams, against the merchants of Salem Town and their local representatives, the Porters...
...But control over the local meeting house was surely desired for its own sake...
...The second-richest family, the Putnams, had distinctly weaker ties to the port...
...By early February 1692, several families with strong Porter associations were declining to take communion at his meeting house and circulating a list of complaints against him...
...on the contrary, belief in its efficacy was heretical...
...there was no incompatibility between them...
...Beyond references to the works of certain recent historians who share his views, Hoffer gives us no reason to believe that the real issue was the political economy of Massachusetts...
...and Elizabeth Hubbard, a servant of a family client...
...two modes of production are said to collide: subsistence farming, and a market society participating in a global exchange of commodities...
...They included a group of girls claiming to have been bewitched...
...In England, witchcraft became illegal in 1542...
...In the Salem of 1692, the first person tried and hanged for consorting with Satan was a poor woman widely (and perhaps rightly) disliked...
...Most likely, as in some recent cases of alleged child abuse, investigators predisposed to expect the worst influenced the testimony of very young, suggestible children by giving them clear indications of the answers expected from them...
...By this time major thinkers were writing treatises pointing fearfully to an infernal empire...
...But by the mid-1680s the Putnam ascendancy became unquestionable, and the Porters—no doubt resenting their opponents' stranglehold— drove out the third man called to the village pulpit...
...In Europe the prosecution of witchcraft reached its peak during the years 1550-1650...
...In medieval times educated Europeans didn't fear the ubiquity of magic among the peasantry...
...29.95...
...The next few cases fit this pattern too...
...So it is not surprising that European witchcraft, as well as the effort to suppress it, was centered in the mountainous zone where today France, Germany and Switzerland meet...
...The richest and most important suspects were never tried, in some cases because the crisis ended before they could be brought to judgment...
...Of the 35 women and men executed for witchcraft in British America, 90 percent suffered in the Puritan colonies...
...At the end of the same month Betty Parris fell ill...
...Folk beliefs along those lines had been consistently ridiculed by the Roman Catholic Church, which conceived of its God as the all-powerful, law-giving king of heaven, with no room for sprites and specters...
...The author's title refers not to the martyrs of 1692 but to the "makers of the Salem witchcraft trials...
...Ultimately, almost all of those involved in the tragedy—including the notorious Cotton Mather, the Congregational minister most responsible for it—concluded that they and not their victims had acted under diabolical influence...
...Salem Village had perhaps 500 inhabitants, chiefly subsistence farmers...
...What is distinctive in his account is the use of "new and striking findings on child abuse, recovered memory, and the psychology of girls in dysfunctional settings [in order] to revisit the motives of the accusers and accused...
...Both seem to have been practiced widely and accepted almost universally by the uneducated...
...But Hoffer's approach does not save him from overlooking an important possibility: that the quarrel between the Putnams and the Porters was to some extent a religious one...
...Hoffer is not alone in regarding the witch craze as a stage in the triumph of international capitalism...
...The former, numerically dominant, aimed to expand westward into the colony's interior...
Vol. 79 • July 1996 • No. 4
