This is the second of a three-part series looking at the Salem witch trials, which began 333 years ago this month. The first article looked at the creation of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, its nature, and the conditions prevailing on the eve of the witch panic. This second article will trace the outbreak of the witch panic in Salem, the issues that shaped its course as it spread through Massachusetts, and the trials. The third article will examine how the witch craze ended and why it has had such an enduring legacy.
As New Year 1692 dawned in Massachusetts Bay, the world as the Puritan colonists saw it looked very bleak. Satan had corrupted the Roman Church and used it to misguide Christians for a thousand years. When the Reformers tried to course-correct, the very Whore of Babylon, ensconced in the Vatican Palace,1 had unleashed the hordes of hell to extinguish the True Faith. A fight for survival, lasting a century-and-a-half, had only ended in living memory. Before that bloodbath on the Continent had ended, many Puritans been forced out of their homeland by King Charles I, a servant if only through weakness of the Romish Antichrist.2 England was only spared the evil of re-enslavement to Rome by the evil of the Civil Wars, and just when it seemed deliverance was at hand, the triumph of God’s elect had been annulled. Romanism had wormed its way back, first covertly with Charles II and then openly with James II. A rescue operation, as Puritans judged the arrival of William of Orange, had succeeded in the Mother Country, but in the colonies—assailed by Native tribes, deadly creatures, and the elements at the best of times—the sense of foreboding mounted.
The relentless Franco-Native attacks, a joint assault of popery and paganism; the economic ruin from the war and the crop failures; the ceaseless social unrest, everyday bickering among neighbours and a major dispute over deposing the town’s minister: all were indicators of God’s anger, signs that the Puritan Garden of Eden was infested with snakes, and the punishment—seemingly imminent—would be the Colony’s physical doom. The frighteningly unclear political situation—the Governor appointed and not present—was an extension of this existential dread: perhaps God’s judgment on their failure to uproot the Devil’s agents would be rendered bureaucratically, by the abolition of the godly commune and the transformation of Massachusetts into another Colony of Virginia, an outpost of Mammon under an established Church that persecuted those truly seeking reformation.3
THE OUTBREAK OF THE SALEM WITCH PANIC
The story of the Salem witch panic, told so well in Emerson Baker’s A Storm of Witchcraft, took place against this backdrop, and began in the home of Samuel Parris, the minister whose status had been the subject of a months-long factional dispute, which had resulted in the removal of much of his income in October 1691 when many parishioners refused to pay his salary any further.
In mid-January 1692, Parris noticed his daughter, Betty Parris, aged 9, and his niece (her cousin) Abigail Williams, aged 11, behaving strangely. The minister and his wife thought it might be a sign of sickness—potentially lethal in the harsh colonial conditions and before antibiotics.
Reverend John Hale, called in from the neighbouring village of Beverly for a second opinion, recorded:
These children were bitten and pinched by invisible agents; their arms, necks, and backs turned this way and that way, and returned back again, so as it was impossible for them to do of themselves, and beyond the power of any epileptic fits, or natural disease to effect. Sometimes they were taken dumb, their mouths stopped, their throats choked, their limbs wracked and tormented so as might move a heart of stone to sympathise with them.4
The girls continued like this for a month. Parris by mid-February strongly suspected witchcraft, and he does not seem to have kept this to himself. When Paris and his wife went to a religious lecture on 25 February, a neighbour, Mary Sibley, came to the house and had the Parrises’ two slaves,5 Tituba and her husband, John Indian, make a “witch cake” that could “detect the identity of the girls’ tormentors. They baked a loaf of rye bread mixed with some urine from the afflicted girls, then fed it to the family dog. … When the dog ate the witch cake, it was supposed to reveal the witch’s identity. Indeed, the afflicted girls soon cried out that it was Tituba who was tormenting them.”6 As much danger as Tituba was now in, Sibley was in more: in telling Reverend Parris of her “discovery”, she was not merely among the accused; she had confessed to witchcraft—even if it was “white magic”. Later, Parris would identify Sibley’s “diabolical” dabblings as the origin point of Salem’s troubles, the “means [by which] the Devil hath been raised amongst us”.7
Two miles away, just outside the boundary of Salem Village, on the same day as the witch cake was baked, two other girls began reporting demonic visitations. Ann Putnam Jr., 12, the most individually important character in our story, said a spectre had pinched her and tried to make her sign a covenant with Satan. Putnam identified the spectre as Sarah Good, a poor and difficult woman, often sharp-tongued even with those who sought to help her, who lived in the shadow of her father’s suicide, a grave sin to Puritans. The other girl, Elizabeth Hubbard, 17, said Good had sent a wolf after her, and that she was being tormented by Sarah Osburn, a bedridden widow in her late 40s who had scandalised Salem by purchasing the contract of an indentured servant and marrying him.8
These four children with an average age of 12—Betty Parris, Abigail Williams, Ann Putnam Jr., and Elizabeth Hubbard—would be remembered as the “Salem Girls”, the motor for the infamous events in New England in 1692.
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