A Silence in Two Salems
ANNETTE ON THE ROAD Northeast US, 2021, Day 6: Salem,Beverly, and Danvers, Massachusetts
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IMPORTANT: If you’re new to Non-Boring History, please note: we’re not on our usual schedule of posts and podcasts. I’m in New England, with my tolerant spouse, He Who Shall Not Be Named On the Internets (HWSNBNOTI, pronounced Hoosen Benoti), and these are my posts from the road, with (as ever) a historical focus.
Confused? Please review the orientation post. Hope that helps!
A couple of days ago, Hoosen and I took you with us to check out the kitschy witchy touristy carnival of Salem, Massachusetts.
Today, we touch on the sobering reality of what happened in 1692.
“Touch on” is the key phrase. To remind you, I am an academic historian, and my fields are early America, Britain, and the connections between them, but I often go outside my areas of greatest knowledge in writing Non-Boring History. That's one of several reasons why my letters to you are not history, but an accessible introduction to subjects in history, much like my college lectures were.
This is especially true when I am on the road. But even without my library to consult, and despite slight rustiness, I feel confident enough to riff on the Salem witch episode. If I find out I got anything wrong, I'll let you know.
Witch Salem?
As I write, I'm sitting in a house on a block that I'm told George Washington once walked along in Beverly, Massachusetts. The town was originally named Beverley for the town in Yorkshire, England. It’s less than one mile north of Salem, to which it's linked by bridges over the Danvers River.
Beverly is the sort of overbuilt place that now describes any flourishing American city. Chain stores, pricy condos, plus local businesses trying to hang on, modest single-family homes that are increasingly far too expensive for people with deep local roots to buy if they don’t already own them.
I have to remind myself that in 1692, Beverly was a rural village of fields and trees.
Idyllic though that sounds, it could also be a much more frightening place then than it is today.
In 1690, a young man called David Balch, 18 or 19 years old, was lying sick in this bedroom in Beverly, in what's now called the Balch House:
David Balch was dying. To everyone’s shock, he claimed that three women in his community, Dorcas Hoar, Wilmot Read, and Sarah Wildes had come to his sickbed as ghosts, or “spectres”, to torment him. He accused them, in other words, of being witches.
David Balch's accusations today could be explained as a fever dream, or even the lashing out of a sick young man. We can be sure that those he singled out were not people he loved, but people normally regarded as outsiders, troublemakers, or difficult characters, or who were involved in disputes with neighbors.
This summed up all three women. Dorcas Hoar had married a fisherman, and typical of fishermen at the time, he was an independent character who wasn't a Puritan. He was punished by local authorities for celebrating Christmas, which the Puritans (not without reason) considered a pagan festival, not a Christian one. In general, he and Dorcas liked to party, which wasn’t an orthodox Puritan thing.
Dorcas Hoar had herself been punished for assisting a burglary ring that stole from her minister and neighbor in Beverly, Reverend John Hale.
That the people Balch accused were women is not a coincidence. Women were less intimidating, more naturally easy to attack than their usually more powerful husbands, and more closely fit the image of a witch.
Why was this? Puritan attitudes to women could be surprisingly progressive. Their role in society was as “godly helpmeets” (sic), the spiritual equals and companions of their husbands, as Eve was to Adam.
But women were also under a cloud: Just as Eve had tempted Adam, women could tempt men to wrongdoing and lead them astray.
Women were also more likely to be feared because it was they who presided over major life transitions. They handled births, and also deaths, laying out the bodies of the dead. They were more often herbalists, supplying supposed remedies for illness. These associations attached to them respect, and a little suspicion, because what they actually did in these roles was typically a bit mysterious to men.
Puritan thinking on women was also influenced by a notorious book on witchcraft called the Malleus Maleficarum (The Hammer of Witches), published in 1486, which was deeply misogynist, and which theologians criticized even at the time for being unethical.
Nonetheless, the Malleus Maleficarum inspired the wave of witch hunts, mostly aimed at women, that afflicted Europe over the next two centuries. It made people in authority think that witchcraft was a major threat, and that witches should be sought out and destroyed. Yet, by 1692, witch hunts, official or among the people, were in decline.
In Beverly, Dorcas Hoar engaged in fortune telling. As we shall see, this does not make her a witch in any meaningful sense, or even all that unusual. Her minister, Rev. John Hale, had counseled her to quit fortune-telling. But like churchgoers everywhere, she did not take her clergyman's advice.
If young David Balch’s accusations had gone to trial in 1690, it's unlikely they would have resulted in convictions. Courts in New England did not accept “spectral evidence”, like Balch's testimony that witches had projected themselves into his room.
What courts did, however, and what ordinary people believed, were two different things. Whatever motivated an ailing teenager to make these accusations, it was sensational news among people in the area.
This incident in Beverly happened just two years before the Salem episode, and was still fresh in people's minds.
Among those arrested for witchcraft two years later, in 1692, you won't be surprised to learn, were the three Beverly women David Balch had accused.
Of the three, Dorcas Hore survived: She was given a temporary reprieve after she “confessed” to witchcraft, and by the time the reprieve expired, the witch episode had ended. Sarah Wildes, who had been involved in disputes with the Putnam family, and Wilmot Read were not so lucky. Both were hanged.
Yet what was most shocking about 1692 is that the usual suspects, like Dorcas Hoar, weren't the only people who were rounded up.
I can't give you anything approaching a complete explanation of 1692 in this post. Fortunately, I do have more time than did the poor actor kid at the Salem Witch Dungeon I visited this past week, who had to try to explain everything in fifteen minutes.
Today, I want to get across what a travesty this episode was, and why it matters far, far more to us than we probably imagine.
I can also help us (you and me) understand why modern Salem is not the place to go if you want to understand what happened in Salem in 1692.
This won’t be the last time I write about New England witch accusations for you. It's one of the subjects I most loved to teach in college, because academic historians have done a terrific job of studying and explaining all the reasons these happened, and because Salem especially can serve as an extraordinary cautionary tale if we would only take the time to learn it, about how normally decent people can lash out in difficult times, and how their conviction of their own rightness can serve as a shield behind which they do truly terrible things.
As some of you already know, one of the first pieces I wrote for Non-Boring History was Rebecca Nurse is Cancelled, an Annette Tells Tales piece (also available as a podcast) that was my first attempt to bring the horror of 1692 home to you, to make it real. You may want to read it next.
For now, know that I plan to make deeper dives in future. Why don't people know more about this, if it's so important? One reason that even the most educated Americans struggle with history is that from kindergarten through college, chances are that you learned it from a mile wide, inch deep curriculum, itself based on a misguided effort to “cover” “everything”.
The whole point of Non-Boring History is to suggest another way of learning history. I tell stories full of meaning and relevance, many of which turn out to be connected.
And what better subject to make this point than the Salem witch episode of 1692.
Two Things to Know
Let’s be clear: Evil happened in this part of Massachusetts in 1692, but it had nothing to do with witchcraft or the Devil, and most of the action didn’t happen in Salem.
First, much as people might wish for, or imagine, or “sense” a connection, there were no witches here.
Let me repeat that, loudly:
There were no witches here.
Nothing spooky, eerie, or supernatural actually happened in 1692. You can believe otherwise, and that's your prerogative. But as a historian, regardless of my beliefs, I'm beholden to actual evidence.
And what happened in 1692 is all explainable by real life.
Second thing to get clear: While the trials of accused witches happened in Salem, the focus of the witch episode in 1692 was not Salem.
The events leading to the Salem witch trials did not happen in Salem.
The focus of the crisis was the quiet nearby town of Danvers, Massachusetts, to the northwest of Beverly, and even farther northwest of Salem. Today, the whole area is part of suburban Boston, with all the traffic that implies crawling along twisty old New England roads. If I drive from Salem to the heart of Danvers today, it takes 12 minutes or so. If I walk, it would take one and three quarter hours. So that gives you some idea of the distance between Salem and Danvers in 1692.
Except that there was no such place as Danvers in 1692.
That’s because Danvers had not yet changed its name, as it would in the mid-18th century, out of embarrassment for the village’s central role in the unspeakable tragedy.
In 1692, the community today known as Danvers was known as Salem Village. Before that, it was called Salem Farms. These older names hint at this community's relationship with the coastal seaport of Salem. While Salem thrived, Salem Village was a rural hinterland, a backwater.
I have studied some horrific things. But strangely, I have found the odd events in this little community of Salem Village in 1692 as terrifying as any injustice or cruelty that I have studied or imagined in the past thirty years, precisely because it was so apparently random, and defied any sort of reason or rationale.
And because it keeps happening, in so many places, and so often.
People attacking each other is a major theme of history, and it is always horrific. But people in a small, close-knit community lashing out at each other, neighbors, families and friends, when longstanding tensions explode during a traumatic period? People so absolutely convinced of their own rightness that they don't hesitate to murder the bodies and spirits of people they know well? That's terrifying.
To really grasp the meaning of 1692 requires becoming as familiar as we can be with a little community in New England, through a stash of old documents in spidery handwriting at a distance of three hundred years.
We have to set aside words like “witchery”, “witchy”, “spooky”, “eerie”. They're irrelevant. We have to set aside the supernatural, except to acknowledge that beliefs in God, Devil, and magic were parts of everyday life in Salem Village in 1692.
Doesn't focusing on reality like this make the story of Salem boring?
Not at all.
Religion, Magic, and Witchcraft
New England Puritans were devoted Christians. But theirs was a tough religion.
Puritan faith was deeply polarizing. It taught that there was good, evil, and nothing in between. It taught that you were either saved, or you were damned, and that God had decided at the dawn of time which of these was your destiny.
You could not change your fate by your actions. You couldn't achieve salvation through your faith, or your good deeds.
And you didn't even know whether you were saved or damned, which was positively crazy-making: One poor young woman in early New England threw her baby down a well, because then she would know she was damned.
You lived in hope of being among the fortunate, the Elect. But, of course, you wanted more assurance about whether you were bound for heaven or hell than just hoping for the best. You looked for signs in yourself that you were saved. But if you became convinced you were saved, then you were guilty of hubris, the deadly sin of pride, and that put you back at square one.
The Puritans in New England developed a way to help with the dilemma: If you had an experience of God's grace, or, in other words, a sudden blinding realization of God's role in your life, and you could convince your congregation of your experience, then you were admitted to full church membership, and allowed to take communion. You were now known as a “visible saint”. And you had a reasonable expectation—but not a guarantee— of going to heaven.
But no wonder more and more people, men especially, mentally checked out from this miserable faith. As the decades passed, and the founding generation from England died off, fewer and fewer people, men especially, didn't even bother trying to be admitted to full membership in the church. Most of the people in 1692 were born in New England, and less zealous than their immigrant English parents.
Complementary Spirituality
Anyway, religion only went so far to help in everyday problems. Just as people today might supplement evidence-based medical treatment with alternative remedies (no matter how unproven or questionable or downright harmful), people in 17th century New England had an alternative belief system to which they turned when Christianity was inadequate for their needs. Their ministers didn't approve, of course, but oh, well. There are a lot of things ministers didn’t approve that everyone was doing.
That system was magic. No, I don't believe in it, but they did.
Let's say your cow died, and you had just had a quarrel with your neighbor. You might suspect that your neighbor had used magic to kill your cow.
How do you figure out whether she did, in fact, kill your cow?
In a society founded on the idea of godly communities, of neighbors working together for the common good, in which everyone knew everyone else, you would think you guys could sort it all out over a cup of coffee, right?
But no. These people in 1692 are just as complicated as we are today. And just like us, they are a little afraid of confrontation.
Praying didn’t seem likely to provide an answer to your question, since God isn't a helpful detective. Instead, you might use good magic to find out whether your neighbor killed your cow. You might balance a sieve on a pair of scissors, and ask the question: Did my neighbor kill my cow? Depending on which way your sieve tipped, there was your answer.
But wait, you say. What’s with the magic? Weren't these people devout Christians?
Yes. Yes, they were.
But they used magic? Isn't that “eerie and spooky”? Isn't it actual, real witchcraft?
Yes, they did. No, it isn't. “Magic” was what we once called superstitions, and now might refer to as folk beliefs, living uneasily side by side with Christianity.
That never went away.
Look, just think of people today, including Christians, who talk about astrology (I'm a Virgo!) Who find their fortune cookie predictions meaningful. Who avoid walking under ladders, or who throw salt over their shoulders after spilling some, for “good luck”. I know an Englishman who dismisses centuries of Christian theology (scholarship on religion) as claptrap, but is completely convinced that ghosts are real, based on TV documentaries with lots of spooky music.
And yes, include me among the credulous, still haunted by ancient folk beliefs. The other day, as Hoosen and I turned on an intersection in Salem, he noticed a black cat run in front of our car. We're not people who believe in magic or superstition. But he concluded we were doomed, and I agreed. For the record, we’re not witches, either. Update: Reader Julia reminded me in the comments that Brits believe the opposite, that the black cat is good luck. So I guess Hoosen and I canceled each other out!
Oh, and know that my great-grandmother in Scotland deftly combined Christianity and magic in recommending that to get rid of a cyst, you hit it with a Bible. Since the Bible was the heaviest book in the house, this was also a practical suggestion. It worked.
But back to 17th century New England, and the dead cow. Once you have established that your neighbor is the guilty party, you might take her to court, accused of witchcraft.
That's your big indication that this “godly society” was no more harmonious than any other supposedly harmonious community (does such a thing exist??)
But here's the thing. Going to court brings your squabble to be assessed by the elite. Ministers and trained lawyers did not (in theory anyway) think that “good magic” existed. All magic was bad. But it was only magic if it actively involved the Devil. And to win your case against your neighbor, you must have evidence that the Devil was present and involved.
However, when you present your evidence in court, you never mention the Devil. Just the cow, your neighbor, and the magic you think she used. You may, ahem, forget to mention the magic you used to suss her out.
Case dismissed.
That was the typical outcome of the many accusations of witchcraft in 17th century New England. They didn’t make it to court, or they resulted in an acquittal. That's likely one reason why witchcraft accusations were in decline by the late 17th century.
And then Salem happened.
A Distant Mirror of Us
These people of 17th century Massachusetts had far more in common with us today than we might expect.
A Note To My British Readers
Brits, I’m including you in this discussion. Please note that many of the people we’re talking about either were English, or their parents were. Just one example: Sarah Wilde, accused by David Balch, had parents who emigrated from Chipping Norton, in the Cotswolds. And just check out the fun place names in this area:
This is a story involving sons and daughters of England, and contrary to what English people often think, unlike the Scots and Irish (who cannily keep in touch with the people of their diasporas) English emigrants did not vanish or stop being English when they sailed away from Old Blighty.
Whether you are in Britain, the US, or anywhere else this applies, think of how sure we are today that we are right about our views. That those who disagree with us are not only wrong, but evil. Think of the troubled times in which we live, in which the very existence of our societies, whether local, national, or global, seems under threat from outside forces, from pandemic to climate change. Think, and this is not a random example, but a very personal one, of how much anger and blame lately has been focused, even by young women, on middle-aged women, especially those who can't identify their way out of being just plain women, and who are lumped together as wicked “Karens”.
Think.
Massachusetts Under Attack
If we're going to understand, really understand Salem, we have to become aware of the horror that this happened to people just like you and me. We have to accept that those accused of witchcraft in 1692, and those who did the accusing, and those who protested, and those who stood by and let it happen, were not remote figures, wax models,or scrawls on old documents.
Yes, they thought differently from us. But they nonetheless were us. They were people, as complicated as anyone today.
And those who were accused in 1692 were not accused because they were evil, or witches, or devil worshippers. Many of them weren't even outsiders of any kind. They were ordinary.
They were accused because, through no doing of their own, they became the focus for the massive anxiety of people who had, in recent years, been under tremendous cultural strain.
These people set aside the rationality of their Christian belief system, their common decency, and their courage, and embraced something entirely arbitrary, a way of thinking with no clear rules.
And they used this new way of thinking to persecute, or allow to be persecuted, their neighbors, friends, and family, even to death.
Let’s not forget: People died in 1692. Lives were ruined. Their persecutors, and those who enabled them, were people who were convinced that not only was evil real, but that it was living among them.
They were right, I guess.
Except that the evil, whether conscious or, more often and more scarily, unconscious, lay not in the accused, but in themselves.
By 1692, the Puritan colony of Massachusetts Bay, founded in 1630 as a proud representative of God on earth, was on its knees.
Its people had been afflicted by epidemics of smallpox, a frightening and invisible bug that struck at random.
They had been terrorized by the threat of Indian invasion. This was not a distant worry. In King Philip's, or Metacom's, War of 1676, Indian fighting forces got to within 20 miles of Boston.
The colony's self-government was also in trouble. Massachusetts Bay had been founded only sixty years earlier by Puritans escaping persecution in England. The colony had been supposed to serve as a blueprint for a godly society that England might follow.
Now, it was falling apart. To explain this, I need to give you a bit of short and painless political history.
King James II, who came to the English throne in 1685, was no fan of anyone who showed signs of independence from him. This included faraway Puritans in America, because he resented the self-rule of their colonies.
He immediately retracted the founding charter of Massachusetts Bay, its entire basis of self-government.
In its place, James combined several colonies into one administrative unit, the so-called Dominion of New England. This even included New York, not one of the Puritan colonies, which was Dutch until James, as Duke of York, took power.
James placed the Dominion of New England under the command of a non-Puritan governor, a tactless soldier named Edmund Andros.
Andros even required that Puritan places of worship, known as meetinghouses, be opened to Anglican church services, even in the heart of Boston.
In one stroke, Andros had imposed the Church of England on a society that had been based on a rejection of mainstream Anglicanism. A society whose founders had hoped to serve as a model of how the Church of England should be.
The Dominion of New England didn't last long. Four years before witchcraft accusations erupted in Salem, James II was overthrown in England. As soon as they heard the news from London, New Englanders lost no time in overthrowing Andros, his representative.
But the damage was done. The colony's original charter, the basis for their government, land ownership, and law, was not restored. Instead, the new joint monarchs, William and Mary, issued a new charter, one which included a governor appointed in London, Sir William Phips.
While they waited for Phips to cross the Atlantic, the people of Massachusetts Bay were not only anxious, but living without a proper court system. That’s because there was nobody in charge to confirm or appoint judges. Cases that normally involved courts run by trained lawyers were only heard by untrained magistrates, prominent members of the community.
This, in a very brief nutshell, was the state of things in Massachusetts in 1692, a time of enormous uncertainty, of attacks from the outside that included invisible enemies, from smallpox to the King, who threatened the very existence of a colony that had believed for two generations that it had a special mission from God, and yet found His protection sorely lacking, as things fell apart. It was also a place that didn’t have an adequate system to resolve disputes.
Salem Village in Meltdown
Unless they attended school in Massachusetts, people today are often surprised to learn that only the witch trials were held in Salem. The action took place mostly in nearby Salem Village, now known as Danvers.
It Wasn't Poisoned Bread
Why was this particular village Ground Zero in 1692?
Let’s be clear: The witch crisis had nothing to do with poisoned grain stores, no matter how adamant Cousin Alice was on this subject last Thanksgiving, after she watched a documentary arguing that poisoned grain explains the strange behavior of the young Salem Village girls who accused people of witchcraft.
Okay. This is the problem with letting scientists have a crack at addressing historical problems: They always want to “solve” problems with a single discovery, an instant answer we can all easily understand.
That's nice. But this means we have to believe that ergot poisoning caused by contaminated wheat in Salem Village in 1692 only affected young girls. Unless everyone else in Salem Village was on the Keto diet, that's a big stretch.
So my suggestion is that scientists return to their test tubes, and that they leave the serious work to historians. We'll be sure to call you if we have any questions, guys.
As ever in history, there’s not a single reason for why Salem Village, specifically, was the center of the action in 1692. But let’s start with this:
Salem Village was a community that had its own internal divisions. It had the usual quarrels among neighbours that you expect in any village, then and now.
Thomas Putnam (whose father, an Englishman, came over from Buckinghamshire) and his wife Ann had several kids, the oldest of whom was twelve year old Ann, Jr. The Putnams often argued with the old couple who lived next door, the Nurses.
Francis Nurse, a skilled and prosperous craftsman from England, was married to Rebecca, who had emigrated from Great Yarmouth as a young woman, with her family, including her sisters Mary Esty and Sarah Cloyce.
The major reason for the two families’ arguments? The property line between their lands.
But petty squabbles like these took a new significance against the backdrop of Salem Village, Massachusetts, in 1692.
To the dismay of some, Salem Village was not an independent community. Even its church (called a meetinghouse in New England Puritanism) was a satellite, a chapel, of the church in the port town of Salem. This is only surprising when you consider that Puritanism in general gave power to congregations.
Among those not happy about this lack of independence? Samuel Parris, the new minister of Salem Village.
The Role of Samuel Parris
Born in London, Samuel Parris emigrated to Massachusetts as a child. After attending Harvard, he had a stroke of good luck: He inherited a Barbados sugar plantation, and enslaved people, which promised to make him very rich.
But then his plantation was wiped out by a hurricane. Parris returned to Massachusetts with one slave, Tituba, married, and took the job as minister of Salem Village.
This was not a prize position for a clergyman: Salem Village was known as a very contentious place, and the church had gone through three ministers in recent years, including Rev. George Burroughs.
Samuel Parris would be no exception to bad relationships between Salem Village clergy and their flock. In 1690, the year after he arrived, they refused to pay his wages.
Meanwhile, Parris had come to the rural backwater that was Salem Village during a time when the Port of Salem was booming.
Some of that hugely profitable economic activity, which was already linking the port of Salem to a larger world of sugar and slavery via trade with the West Indies, was trickling down to some people in little Salem Village.
People in Salem Village who were benefiting from this prosperity, were typically those tavernkeepers and farmers who were closest to Salem town. That's because they could make good money supplying travelers to and from the busy port with accommodation, and the prosperous townspeople with food. These Salem villagers absolutely did NOT want to become independent from Salem town.
But the boom in the port of Salem was not trickling down to everyone, and that included Samuel Parris. He and other Salem Villagers who DID want to separate from Salem town tended to be those who lived farthest from it, and so benefited least from the relationship.
For this next bit, pay close attention.
Have you noticed that when people don’t think we're benefiting from something, we tend to reject it? Maybe you didn’t get into a club you wanted to, and then decided it wasn’t something you wanted anyway. Maybe houses in your area were not rising in value when others in your city were, but, hey, who wants to live with snobby people anyway? Maybe your kid didn’t get into that elite college. Who cares when she can get a just as good, maybe better, education at the local state university?
People in Salem Village in 1692 who were shut out of the benefits of being close to the port town of Salem began, as people do, to think of their disadvantage as a source of pride. They, not the profit-making villagers, were the true Christians, still living the modest, community-focused way that God had intended when He brought them to New England.
Just as their parents had rationalized that God had intended to drop them off in the cold, rocky, dreary landscape of New England, the people of 1692 Salem Village rationalized their own continuing struggles as God's will for their community, and a sign of their own virtue.
A Eureka Moment for Two Historians
When historians Paul Boyer and Stephen Nissenbaum mapped out the Salem Village homes of people accused of being witches, their accusers, and allies who signed petitions defending the accused, they were startled to realize that accused witches and their defenders lived closest to Salem town, while those who did the accusing lived farthest away.
Boyer and Nissenbaum published their findings in 1974 in a book called Salem Possessed. It’s a brilliant piece of academic history. And one thing they saw clearly was the central role of Reverend Samuel Parris in igniting the crisis.
The Central Role of Samuel Parris
Reverend Samuel Parris encouraged his Salem Village flock to divide among themselves. He demanded loyalty to himself, and condemned those who hesitated. He talked of people as either good or evil, and there was no in-between. Either you were with Samuel Parris, or you were his enemy.
His congregation became deeply divided.
And then the witch episode began.
And of all places, it started in the Rev. Samuel Parris's house.
Who's a Witch?
It all started one day with Rev. Parris's young daughter, Betty, age 9, and his niece Abigail Williams, age 12. Parris and his wife were raising Abigail after she was orphaned in an Indian attack on the edge of New England.
On this day, these two children of the minister's household were doing something very common, but very naughty, and they knew the minister wouldn't approve: They were telling their own fortunes, using an egg white suspended in a glass of water as a primitive crystal ball, to see the faces of their future husbands.
Suddenly, one of the girls screamed. She had seen in the swirling egg and water mixture a picture, not of a young man, but of a coffin. She was convinced she was going to die.
Soon, the terrified girls became “afflicted”. They made odd physical contortions and sounds. In Parris's presence, Abigail ran across the room, flapping her arms. She pulled a burning log from the fire, and flung it out of the fireplace, an action for which, in normal times, Parris would have beaten her.
There was no concept of adolescence, and the least powerful people in Salem Village, except for unfree people like Tituba, the enslaved Indian who served the household, were young girls.
Now, though, everything outrageous Abigail and Betty did inspired not condemnation, but concern, and fear.
They began to name witches who had led them astray, starting with the family’s slave, Tituba, whom they accused of having taught them fortune-telling. A terrified Tituba confessed, in hopes of saving her life. Contrary to what you learned from Arthur Miller's play The Crucible (which is more about the 1950s Red Scare than about what happened in 1692) confession didn't necessarily save you from execution. But it did mean your execution was delayed, and in the end, several people were saved by this delay, including Tituba.
Fun and Important Fact: The girls didn't need Tituba, whom Parris had brought from his previous home in Barbados, to teach them magic. The floating egg white technique that Abigail and Betty used for fortune telling was well known among the English of Massachusetts.
Still, for anyone who wasn’t a child of a clergy family, like Betty and Abigail, such fortune telling could certainly be grounds for a witchcraft accusation. Remember Dorcas Hoar.
At first, the girls accused the usual suspects of witchcraft. These were women and outsiders like Tituba, a woman of color (likely Indian) and Sarah Good, a “mutterer”, a complainer who didn't accept her inferior status quietly. Women like Sarah Osborne, who had created a lot of scandal when she married her Irish indentured servant.
But now more young girls in Salem Village were “afflicted” as Betty and Abigail were. And these three were all associated with Thomas and Ann Putnam: Mercy Lewis, their maid, Ann Putnam, Jr, and her best friend, Mary Wolcott. They had all witnessed the adult Putnams quarrelled with Rebecca and Francis Nurse over the years. Children see and hear everything.
Ann Putnam, Jr accused the respectable, religious, and much-loved Rebecca Nurse of witchcraft.
And here’s one of the things that marks how different Salem was from earlier witchcraft accusations in 1692: Those accused were not only the usual suspects.
Former Salem Village minister George Burroughs, for example, was hauled back from his new home in Maine to face charges of practicing witchcraft. George Jacobs, a respected elderly man who walked with two sticks, was accused.
And not only was Rebecca Nurse, whose husband Francis was a selectman (local councilman) (and leader of the anti-Samuel Parris faction in the village) accused, but so were her two equally respectable married sisters, Mary Esty and Sarah Cloyce.
Many people in Salem Village remained silent, afraid the girls would name them or their family members next.
Brave souls signed petitions to defend family and friends. And they were brave, because the spiraling accusations by the “afflicted” girls had shown that anyone could be accused.
And then the accusations turned into charges, and the accused were arrested and taken to jail in Salem town. Despite the law putting “spectral evidence” off limits, much of the evidence presented to the court, which was presided over by untrained magistrates John Hathorne and Jonathan Corwin, was “spectral”.
Young Ann Putnam, Jr, for example, accused Rebecca Nurse of coming to her in ghostly form, and beating her. Girls accused old George Jacobs of appearing as a spectre, and beating them with his walking sticks.
Hathorne and Corwin accepted this evidence.
The executions took place over three months in the summer of 1692, plenty of time to stop this nightmare, you would think, but no. Every one of those three months, another group of innocent people were hanged. In all, 19 bewildered, frightened, and traumatized people were executed by hanging. One other, Giles Corey, was tortured to death for refusing to enter a plea.
Among those who were hanged:
Sarah Good
Sarah Osborne
Rev. George Burroughs
Rebecca Nurse, and her sister, Mary Esty
George Jacobs
Scores more were accused, arrested, and jailed, awaiting trial. Four of the accused died in the hideous conditions of Salem’s jail.
Others were humiliated and traumatized, including Rebecca Nurse’s sister, Sarah Cloyce. Cloyce was freed when the episode ended, and spent the rest of her life campaigning for justice for her two executed sisters, and herself.
The youngest to be accused and arrested was Dorcas Good, whose mother, Sarah, was executed as a witch in 1692. Dorcas was kept for months, shackled, in Salem jail.
Dorcas Good was four years old.
Has the horror struck you yet? You'll know when it does. The horror of Salem is that this could happen to anyone, and I'm not just talking about the victims. I'm arguing that any of us can participate in evil if we aren’t vigilant, that we need to cultivate empathy no matter how empathetic we like to think we are.
Bear with me.
And Then It Ended
By the end, the “afflicted” girls were being taken through communities in wagons to point out witches. When Sir William Phips, the new governor, arrived from England, Lady Phips was accused of being a witch.
And then it was over. It took a few years for the sickening reality to fully sink in: These communities had murdered their own.
Danvers changed its name a half century later, and swept the whole business under a rug, only agreeing to a memorial in 1992, the three hundredth anniversary of the Salem witch crisis.
But the story doesn't just belong to Danvers, or to Salem.
It belongs to all of us.
Why Should We Care Today?
Imagine, three hundred years from now, that a modern Salem-like carnival, similar to the one I described last week, emerged around Ground Zero, the site of the collapse of the World Trade Center in New York, in 2001. Think about it: T-shirts, weird supernatural conspiracy theories, the lot. People dressed as victims. People in T-shirts showing the dead of 9/11 in the act of dying, cruelly parodied in cartoon.
Imagine that nobody is offended in the year 2301, because, after all, 2001 was a long time ago.
Except you. You have found a copy of a very old book on 9/11, read it from cover to cover, despite the alien 21st century language, and realized that, no, this was real, and it was truly horrible. Suddenly, the three hundred year distance means nothing.
The analogy is not exact, to say the least. Thousands of victims died in New York in 2001. “Only” 19 innocents were hanged in Salem in 1692. Salem, unlike 9/11, despite the conspiracy “theories”, was an attack from the inside, from within communities.
But like 9/11, Salem was yesterday.
Silence in Salem
What I have told you in this post, abbreviated though it is, is far more than you will be able to find out as a visitor to modern Salem.
That’s true, shockingly, even at Salem’s massive Peabody Essex Museum (PEM), the serious museum that should be responsible for presenting this massive bit of local history.
Yet, until last year, PEM hadn’t had a single exhibition on 1692 since the 300th anniversary, thirty years ago. In the last two years, they have staged two tiny temporary exhibitions, neither of which has done as much as to explain 1692, and I say this in all modesty, as this post I have written on the fly.
This is a travesty. Why does PEM not want to deal with this? Why is PEM okay with leaving visitors to Salem, people who are hungry to know more, to pick up what they can from the crappy tourist traps in town?
That’s what a lot of people would like to know, including many locals.
I looked up some news accounts, and then chatted with an informed local man who filled me in. A town meeting, that most democratic of New England institutions, was held on this very question. Hundreds attended, asking PEM to do its job as a local institution.
But PEM no longer thinks of itself as a local institution. It was formed in recent years by the merger of two earlier Salem museums, one of art and one of history. But now it aspires to “world class” status as an art museum (UK: gallery). Its managers and wealthy donors don't care what the ordinary people of Salem think. Nor do they care what the “T-shirted zeros” , the tourists like us, want or need.
The primary audience for PEM is obvious when you walk in the door. The cost of admission is a steep $20. The building is the sort of exalted architecture in which the wealthy expect to live their lives, whether at home, work, school, or, as here, in their leisure time. There are no prices on the jewelry in the gift shop, on the principle that “if you have to ask, you can't afford it.”
When we arrived, the admissions volunteer looked at our Milwaukee Art Museum membership, consulted a dog-eared packet, and sniffily informed Hoosen and me that since we are “only” dual-level members of the Milwaukee members, we were not entitled to free reciprocal admission to PEM, as we had been led to believe. But he condescended to let us in free this time. I almost handed him the $40 just to maintain some dignity. But I didn’t, because my dignity isn't worth forty bucks.
Hoosen and I appreciated several of the exhibits at PEM, which included a fantastic exhibit on trade with China.
But this place is not for tourists. It is not even for most local people. It is primarily for the only people who seem to matter anymore: The wealthy elite, and especially the donors.
And yet donors and, especially, art curators are frustrated. These are people who expect to live in city centers, among the chic and fashionable, the wealthy and celebrated. Yet poor old PEM is stuck out in Salem, a forty minute drive from the real action in Boston.
When the people of Salem demanded PEM have a more local focus, including a proper permanent exhibit on 1692, the leaders of PEM, I was told by my local informant, threatened to move the whole thing to Boston.
The PEM is in Salem, but not of it. It feels resentful. It feels arrogant and self-righteous. And meanwhile, a massive opportunity to spread the word about 1692 is lost.
Yes, there's now a temporary exhibit about Salem at PEM, for the second time in two years. It includes original documents (unreadable to the public, although dog-eared transcriptions are available to borrow) and objects that belonged to the victims, including magistrate John Hathorne's travel trunk, and George Jacobs's stick.
But the exhibit put more emphasis on modern-day witches (including a Black woman who pointed out in the caption that she considers herself a traditional healer, not a witch, a point that was lost by her inclusion), and, bizarrely, spotlights the late fashion designer Alexander McQueen, who was descended from a Salem victim (as are millions of others), and designed a dress in tribute to her.
You can leave this exhibit no wiser about why this event happened, and why we should care. You can leave convinced there's a direct link between Salem in 1692 and modern witchcraft. If you leave knowing more about the history I have written about today, then I have no idea where you got it from.
PEM's attitude is contemptuous of serious history, and, frankly, pathetic.
Memorials
There are three 1692 memorials. Two were erected in 1992, in Salem and Danvers (formerly Salem Village) on the 300th anniversary of the witch episode. We’ll start with the smallest and most recent of the three, built in Salem in 2017.
2017 Proctor's Ledge Memorial, Salem
A memorial was added in 2017 after the discovery of the hill where people were hanged, and the place, Proctor's Ledge, where their bodies were unceremoniously dumped. This place was once in open countryside, but is now very close to the center of modern Salem surrounded by houses. It's small and hard to find, with no nearby parking.
The bodies of the hanged victims were thrown into “crevices” of rock.
Some of the victims’ corpses were quickly recovered by families and buried properly. None of their final resting places are known for certain.
1992 Memorial In Salem
On the edge of Salem’s most ancient cemetery, in a separate and enclosed area, the 1692 memorial, built in 1992, features carved scraps of the victim’s protests of innocence from court records, while each one of them is immortalized in stone slabs inserted sideways into a wall.
In the cemetery next to the memorial, magistrate John Hathorne sleeps well, hidden from his victims' names beneath a carefully-preserved and restored upright gravestone.
In Danvers (Salem Village)
The memorial in Danvers is in a quiet park, where Hoosen and I heard the shouts and laughter from the playground of the school next door. Assuredly, the children playing together include descendants of both accused and accusers of 1692.
The Danvers memorial features more and longer quotations from the victims, and they are heartbreaking. This one I am especially fond of, from Mary Esty, Rebecca Nurse’s sister, who pleaded with the court after her conviction and sentence, not for herself, but for others, so that “no more innocent blood be shed.”
Turn Away
When I finally resigned from Georgia Southern University in 2008, I modeled my resignation letter on Mary Esty’s words. But that, as they say, is a story for another day.
Turn away from cruelty, that’s the takeaway. No matter how stressed we are, and how convinced of our righteousness we think we are when we are tempted to attack and bully individuals, no matter how just we think our cause, no matter how thrilling it is to exert power, let us turn away.
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Truly horrendous—and often made light of with “Well, that was back then.” But, as you say, it is behavior which is oft repeated.
2 comments. (Well, one and a question)
1) Did you realise that one of the last witchcraft cases to go to trial in England was Jane Wenham in Walkern.
We were always told that she was the last, but scholarship moves on.
2) did the number of trials follow the same pattern in USA & England?