A Storm of Witchcraft: The Salem Trials and the American Experience
I decided to switch up the usual review of Salem and do it in January, instead of October, making this weeks book A Storm of Witchcraft: The Salem Trials and the America Experience by Emerson W. Baker.
Why am I reading this now and not in October? I mean, October gets all the witchy love, Salem especially as it has spent the last several hundred years rebranding itself and embracing the stereotype of Witch City, making October an entire month of Halloween, Witchy celebration, all in celebration….er remembrance, of the 25 innocent lives lost as a result of the 1692 hysteria that embraced Salem Town and Salem village. Well that hysteria STARTED in January, 1692, when the daughter and niece of the Reverand Samuel Parris, began having hysterical fits and quasi-seizures. At first, Parris and his wife Elizabeth, were not sure what was going on with their 9 year old daughter Betty and 11 year old niece Abigail. They called in medical doctors and a neighboring minister, Reverand John Hale, to observe their symptoms and see what this might be.
About a month later, while the Parris’s were in a neighboring village for a religious lecture, one of their neighbors, Mary Sibley, directed the Parris’s slaves Tituba and John Indian to make a witch cake. This was white magic, but ANY magic was prohibited in Puritan society. When Parris found out about the witch cake, rye bread baked with urine from the girls and fed to a dog to determine where the attacks were coming from, he traced the introduction of Satan and witchcraft to Salem Village to this incident.
From this point, more accusers joined, most famously Ann Jr AND Ann Sr Putnam….Sr was a surprise since almost all of the afflicted were all girls, just on the cusp of or barely past puberty. The other known accusers include John Indian, husband of the slave woman Tituba, and Bathsheba Pope, who I’ll get back to in just a minute. When the dust had settled from all of this, 156 people would be named in court documents as witches, an additional 16 would be named in private correspondences as witches but never formally charged in court. Of the 172 named list, 20 would be ministers or members of ministers families. One minister, George Burroughs, would be among those executed.
Most people but the dead at 19 hung, 1 pressed to death. Baker lists 25 because he includes the five people who died in the absolutely grueling and inhuman jails while waiting for trial or even release. Fun fact, even if you were found innocent or pardoned by the governor, the jailer had to be paid, and would keep you until your family posted bond. At least one person died in jail waiting for her family so scrape together the money to pay the jailer, after Governor Phips had pardoned all remaining accused and shut down the court of Oyer and Terminer.
So those are the bare bones facts of what happened in Salem in 1692, and an even more succinct synopsis than Baker manages in chapter 1. Baker then traces the origins of the panic even further back, and provides a synopsis of the history of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. The short version of that history is that when the witch trials kicked off, the frontier, which was Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, and even Western Mass, was unstable and rocked by Native American raids. Because the puritans had been extremely heavy handed with the other religious groups in the area, apparently in violation of the original charter, the crown had revoked the original charter, leaving the colonies legal standing in question.
The new governor, William Phips, had been assigned to the colony, along with a new charter, which, while arguably granting more freedoms, was not popular with the Puritan colony because it represented change, and the crown watching. Which, on one hand, I understand. On the other hand, the Puritan’s NEEDED watching. At one point, their religious laws named Quakers….QUAKERS….the friends, the pacifists, the ones who had the absolute gall to see everyone as equal, INCLUDING women….as basically apostates. And if a Quaker was found proselytizing in the colony, he was stripped, tied to a cart, beaten, and force marched out of the colony. And every town they stopped in between the town he was caught and the edge of the colony, he was beaten again. So yeah…the puritans were not big on religious tolerance. But here’s an interesting fact. Not one of the accused witches, was a Quaker. Although at least one Quaker, Bathsheba Pope, aunt to Benjamin Franklin, was happy to throw accusations out.
Baker does float his own idea of what happened, why the girls made the accusations, and the above changes and dangers in Massachusetts led the charge. It was, basically, a case of mass hysteria, which resulted in a marginalized group, i.e. girls who were seen as the lowest status members in the heavily patriarchal puritan society, being front and center and getting some attention. He addresses the long touted theory that it was ergot poisoning that sparked the panic, and dismisses it based on the symptoms don’t actually fit. Other than the “hallucinations” the girls have no other symptoms of ergot poisoning. Additionally, the afflicted, who were from all over Salem Village, would have needed to get their rye from a common source, which would not have been practical at that time. I would add that as a farming community, they would have known what ergot was, and would have taken steps to ensure no contamination hit their food supply.
Additionally, long term effects of ergot poisoning include gangrene in the extremities, and none of that was present in the afflicted. So I am inclined to agree ergot was not part of it. Doesn’t mean they didn’t ingest some OTHER hallucinogen to kick off the festivities, but one thing all historians agree on, is that some level of fraud undoubtedly happened once the afflicted gained steam.
So why were the girls given so much credence? Baker has a theory on that too. The judges had, at this point, actually provided a history of leniency in the courts. Yes, they had hung witches before, but they had recently overseen a piracy case where most of the pirates were let off with fines. Additionally, the judges were incredibly intertwined, with heavy family bonds that tied most of them together through marriage and inheritance. And so Baker thinks the judges, with their family bonds and wealthy backgrounds, and puritan beliefs, were looking for reasons that everything had gone to hell in Massachusetts…I mean, Indian raids were up, the colony lost it’s charter and now had a new governor. Surely witchcraft must be to blame.
So, the judges, accepted an absolutely absurd amount of bullshit evidence. Spectral evidence…ever heard of it. The girls claimed the accused were not directly attacking them….their specters were. The touch test…the belief that if the afflicted was touched by the witch causing the attack, the spectral fluid or something would flow back to the witch, releasing the accused from the attack. Both of these had been heavily questioned following trials in Europe, but were readily accepted by the court of Oyer and Terminer. And in the end, 19 were hung for witchcraft, including Rebecca Nurse and Mary Esty. Now, these two ladies, along with their sister Sarah Cloyce, are arguably the most famous of the witches, along with Sarah Goode. Why were these four the most famous.
Rebecca Nurse and Mary Esty were full members of the church, Saints. Like literally, they were known to be good women. So much so that initially, both were found not guilty. Then the judges sent the jury back to re-deliberate, and both were found guilty. Nurse was excommunicated before being hung. Sarah Cloyce survived the trials and led an exodus out of Salem to modern day Framingham, MA. Their story was immortalized in Three Sovereigns for Sarah, which was produced by PBS in 1985, starring Vaness Redgrave as Sarah Cloyce. Incidentally, this is one of the most accurate portrayals of what happened in Salem. So much so that when reading certain parts of this book, I recognized almost all of it.
Included in that show is the reason Sarah Goode is so infamous: Right before they pushed her off the ladder at gallows hill, she advised the Reverand Nicholas Noyes that she was innocent, saying “You are a liar, I am no more a witch than you are a wizard, and if you take away my life, God will give you blood to drink.”
Those were, in fact, Goode’s last words. And the reason they are so famously remembered is that when Noyes died on December 13, 1717, it was due to an internal hemorrhage that resulted in him choking on his own blood as he died.
Other key victims though include George Burroughs, who was a minister. This was shocking because if a minister can be corrupted, anyone could be. But Burroughs was not a Saint, and the Puritans believe he was nearly a Quaker, meaning, apostate, or someone who had renounced the true faith. Burroughs was among the executed.
John Proctor, who was the employer of afflicted girl Mary Warren, initially advised that when he beat her and threatened her with more of the same, she was miraculously cured. Warren then admitted that it was all playacting, and was quickly accused of witchcraft herself. After a few weeks in jail, she realized it was better to be afflicted than accused, and quickly resumed naming names.
The one who was pressed to death was Giles Cory. One of the legal proceedings under English Law, is that the accused had to agree to be tried by the court, acknowledging their authority to oversee the matter. Cory refused to acknowledge this. So he was strapped to the ground with a board placed over him, to which more and more rocks were added, resulting in his death by crushing weight of rocks.
The poor souls who died in prison, waiting for their innocency to be proclaimed or for their bond to be paid, are Lydia Dustin, died March 10, 1692; Ann Foster, died December 3, 1692; Sarah Osborne, died May 10, 1692; Roger Toothaker, died June 16, 1692; the fifth, at least I believe this is who Baker is referencing, is the true innocent of all this horror. Sarah Goode was pregnant when she was incarcerated. Her baby boy died in prison. At least I think that’s who Baker was referencing.
It all ended when Governor William Phips returned from the war front in Maine in October 1692, to find his wife was now among the accused, and he basically issued an executive order putting a stop to the court of Oyer and Terminer, and issued a unilateral pardon for everyone still in prison. But note the above…Ann Foster died in prison after the pardon. Because she had no one to pay her bond.
And then Phips made a grave error that basically ensured this would never be forgotten. He tried to cover it up. He allowed Cotton Mather, one of the judges of the court, to publish the official version, known as The Wonders of the Invisible World. Which was effectively mocked by basically everyone who read it, but contemporarily and most famously, by Quaker Thomas Maule, who wrote a more accurate contemporaneous version, called Truth Held Forth and Maintained. Maule published this in his own name, initially in New York, but when copies made their way to Massachusetts, he was jailed and tried for Libel. Maule famously stood in court and pointed out that yes, his name was on it, but anyone could have put it there. “He actually mocked the Court of Oyer and Terminer in his defense, saying that his name on the book was ‘no more than the specter of evidence,’ for his name had been placed there by the printer, just as the devil might use an innocent man’s specter.”
This is among the first attempted government cover ups, and like all cover ups, failed spectacularly, as the Witch trials have resulted, three hundred years later, in Salem becoming known as Witch City, and has become major Witch Tourism.
This book was well done. It’s broken down into the general history of the area, the afflicted, the accused, the judges, and the aftermath. It provided a comprehensive overview of the timeline and allowed that at that time in history, witchcraft was a foregone conclusion. Not that the accused were actually witches, but that witchcraft was known to exist and be a very real concern in the 17th century. I quite liked this book, and if you’re looking for a broad overview of Salem 1692, I highly recommend it.
