In the Devil's Snare (40 page)

Appendix I

Appendix II

Participants in the Salem Witchcraft Crisis
with Ties to the Northern Frontier

AFFLICTED ACCUSERS AND CONFESSORS

Sarah Churchwell
Abigail Hobbs
Deliverance Hobbs
^†
Mercy Lewis
Mary Swayne Marshall*
Margaret Rule
Susannah Sheldon
Mercy Short
Mary Walcott*
Mary Watkins

ACCUSED

John Alden
Mary Barker*
Sarah Hood Bassett*

Close relative of person with frontier ties

† Probable link to frontier

Mary Bradbury*
Rev. George Burroughs
Sarah Towne Cloyce*
Mary Bassett DeRich*
Elizabeth Dicer
Philip English
Mary English*
Captain John Floyd
Nicholas Frost
Thomas Hardy
William Hobbs
^†
Ann Jacobs Moodey
^‡
Mary Osgood*
Lady Mary Spencer Phips
Elizabeth Bassett Proctor*
Ann Greenslade Pudeator
Margaret Thacher
Hezekiah Usher Jr.*
Samuel Wardwell
Samuel Willard*

JUDGES, JURORS, CLERGYMEN, AND OFFICIALS

Jonathan Corwin
Thomas Danforth
Thomas Fiske
Bartholomew Gedney
John Hathorne
Rev. Joshua Moodey
Sir William Phips
Major Robert Pike
John Ruck*
Nathaniel Saltonstall
Samuel Sewall
William Stoughton
Waitstill Winthrop

Close relative of person with frontier ties

† Probable link to frontier

‡ Possibly accused

Appendix III

Appendix IV

Notes

Abbreviations used in the notes and a note on editorial practices

AAS: American Antiquarian Society

AAS Procs: Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society

BPL: Boston Public Library

Burr
, Narratives:
George Lincoln Burr, ed.,
Narratives of the Witchcraft Cases,
1648–1706
(New York, 1914)

Calef
, MWIW,
in
WDNE:
Robert Calef,
More Wonders of the Invisible World
(1700), in
WDNE

CO: Colonial Office Papers, Public Record Office, London

CSM Pubs: Publications of the Colonial Society of Massachusetts

CW: Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, Williamsburg, Virginia

DHSM:
James Phinney Baxter, ed.,
Documentary History of the State of Maine,
in
Collections of the Maine Historical Society,
2d ser., vols. 4 (1889), 5 (1897), 6 (1900), 9 (1907)

EC Ct Recs:
George F. Dow, ed.,
Records and Files of the Quarterly Courts of Essex
County Massachusetts
, 9 vols. (Salem, Mass., 1911–1975)

EC Ct Recs/WPA, ser. 2: Essex County Court Records, WPA typescripts, series 2, PEM

EIHC: Essex Institute Historical Collections

f: folio

fol.: folder

GDMNH:
Sybil Noyes, Charles Thornton Libby, and Walter Goodwin Davis,
Genealogical Dictionary of Maine and New Hampshire
(1928–1933; reprint, Baltimore, Md., 1996)

HCTHS: Historical Collections of the Topsfield Historical Society

HL: Huntington Library, San Marino, California

JA, MSA: Judicial Archives, Massachusetts State Archives, Boston

LCMD: Library of Congress Manuscript Division

Lincoln,
Narratives:
Charles H. Lincoln, ed.,
Narratives of the Indian Wars,
1675–1699
(New York, 1913)

MA: Massachusetts Archives series, Massachusetts State Archives, Boston

Mather
, DL,
in Lincoln,
Narratives:
Cotton Mather,
Decennium Luctuosum: An
History of Remarkable Occurrences in the Long War, which New-England hath
had with the Indian Salvages . . .
(1699)
,
in Lincoln,
Narratives

Mather
, WIW,
in
WDNE:
Cotton Mather,
Wonders of the Invisible World
(1693), in
WDNE

MeHS: Maine Historical Society, Portland

MGHR: Maine Genealogical and Historical Register

MHS:
Massachusetts Historical Society, Boston

MHS Colls: Collections of the Massachusetts Historical Society

MHS Procs: Proceedings of the Massachusetts Historical Society

MSA: Massachusetts State Archives, Boston

NEHGR: New England Historical and Genealogical Register

NEHGS: New England Historic Genealogical Society, Boston

NEQ: New England Quarterly

PEM: James Duncan Phillips Library, Peabody Essex Museum, Salem

Sibley’s Harvard Graduates:
John Langdon Sibley,
Biographical Sketches of Graduates
of Harvard University, in Cambridge, Massachusetts
(Cambridge, Mass., 1873)

SVR: Vital Records of Salem, Massachusetts,
5 vols. (Salem, Mass., 1916–1925)

SWP:
Paul Boyer and Stephen Nissenbaum, eds.,
The Salem Witchcraft Papers: Verbatim Transcripts of the Legal Documents of the Salem Witchcraft Outbreak of 1692,
3 vols. (New York, 1977)

SWP/SJC/PEM: Essex County Court Archives, Salem Witchcraft Papers, Supreme Judicial Court, deposit PEM

WDNE:
Samuel G. Drake, ed.,
The Witchcraft Delusion in New England,
3 vols. (Roxbury, Mass., 1866)

WMQ: William and Mary Quarterly

Wyllys Papers (Brown): Wyllys Papers, Annmary Brown Memorial, Brown University, Providence

Wyllys Papers (CSL): Wyllys Papers, Connecticut State Library, Hartford

I have retained original spelling in all quotations, but have silently
expanded common abbreviations, lowered superscript letters and numbers,
and replaced the thorn with the modern English letters
th.

INTRODUCTION

As in this paragraph, all dates in this book are given in the Old Style (O.S.) or Julian calendar in use in England and its colonies in the 1690s. Under the Julian calendar, not replaced in the British domains with the New Style (Gregorian) calendar until 1752, the new year began on 25 March. Thus all dates between 1 January and 24 March in a Julian year were commonly written as both years: 1691/2. By the late seventeenth century, the O.S. calendar was about ten days out of synchronization with the sun. Secondary works covering this period sometimes convert O.S. dates to N.S. by adding ten days, which has subsequently led to confusion about when certain events in the crisis occurred.

Exact figures on the number of people accused in the Salem witchcraft crisis are difficult to derive both because the documentary record is incomplete and because certain errors have crept into scholarship over the years. A few authors total all those people ever publicly named, even if formal complaints were never filed. Some use the number of people identified in the table of contents of
SWP,
but seven of those were accusers rather than accused. Moreover, one ( John Lee) was not involved in the crisis but was included because of an archivist’s mistake; one (Jerson Toothaker) is a phantom created by a WPA transcriber’s misreading of a label on a document; two girls (Hannah and Joanna Tyler) were erroneously collapsed into one person; one, Rachel Hatfield Clinton, is listed twice, under both her surnames; and the records of one man (Daniel Eames) were completely missed by the 1930s researchers who compiled the data published in
SWP.
The figures in the text, therefore, are my own. Those against whom formal legal steps were taken are easier to identify than those who were merely mentioned by an accuser, and so I have employed the former figure as a benchmark.

The persistent ergot-poisoning hypothesis was first advanced in Linnda R. Caporeal, “Ergotism: The Satan Loose in Salem?”
Science
192 (2 April 1976): 21–26; it was subsequently refuted in Nicholas P. Spanos and Jack Gottlieb, “Ergotism and the Salem Village Witch Trials,” ibid., 194 (24 Dec. 1976): 1390–94, although Mary K. Matossian tried to resurrect it in Poisons of the Past: Molds, Epi
demics, and History
(New Haven, 1989), 113–22. Laurie Winn Carlson, in
A Fever
in Salem
(Chicago, 1999), contends that both people and beasts in Salem Village in 1692 were afflicted with encephalitis. However, Prof. Maurice White of the Cornell University College of Veterinary Medicine, an expert on the diseases of livestock, concluded after surveying Ms. Carlson’s evidence that “there is no realistic single explanation for the signs in the animals and people consistent with our present scientific knowledge of human and veterinary medicine” (personal communication, 16 April 2000). Major flaws in hypotheses involving disease, food poisoning, or drug-induced hallucinations are that even if correct they cannot explain the content of the girls’ visions, and that they cannot explain contemporary observations that the girls appeared healthy whenever the specters were not tormenting them (that is, most of the time).

Chadwick Hansen,
Witchcraft at Salem
(New York, 1969) argues for the reality of witchcraft in Salem Village in 1692. Bernard Rosenthal, in
Salem Story:
Reading the Witch Trials of 1692 (Cambridge, U.K., 1993), concludes that the girls were faking. For treatments of them as probable hysterics, see Marion L. Starkey,
The Devil in Massachusetts: A Modern Enquiry into the Salem Witch Trials
(New York, 1949), and Frances Hill,
A Delusion of Satan: The Full Story of the Salem Witch
Trials (New York, 1995); and as delinquents, Peter Hoffer, The Devil’s Disciples:
Makers of the Salem Witchcraft Trials
(Baltimore, 1996). 5. For Boyer and Nissenbaum’s denial of the importance of the afflicted girls, see
Salem Possessed: The Social Origins of Witchcraft
(Cambridge, Mass., 1974), 35, n. 26: “we think it a mistake to treat the girls themselves as decisive shapers of the witchcraft outbreak as it evolved”; their thesis in general privileges men’s concerns over women’s. But cf. John P. Demos, “Underlying Themes in the Witchcraft of Seventeenth-Century New England,”
American Historical Review
75 (1970): 1311–26, for a woman-centered analysis of colonial cases. On England, see Clive Holmes, “Women: Witches and Witnesses,”
Past & Present,
no. 140 (1993): 45–78; and Diane Purkiss,
The Witch in History: Early Modern and Twentieth-Century
Representations
(New York, 1996), part 2.

A recent synthesis that conceptualizes a study of Salem witchcraft as a study of trials is Bryan Le Beau,
The Story of the Salem Witch Trials
(Upper Saddle River, N.J., 1998); two of those with a broader perspective are Larry Gragg,
The Salem
Witch Crisis
(New York, 1992); and Boyer and Nissenbaum,
Salem Possessed
.
In the
Devil’s Snare is a successor volume to my Founding Mothers & Fathers: Gendered
Power and the Forming of American Society
(New York, 1996), which examined the theme of gender and politics in New England and the Chesapeake before approximately 1675.

For Salem Village, see Boyer and Nissenbaum,
Salem Possessed;
for legal practice, Peter Hoffer,
The Salem Witchcraft Trials
(Lawrence, Kansas, 1997), and David T. Konig,
Law and Society in Puritan Massachusetts: Essex County, 1629–1692
(Chapel Hill, N.C., 1979); for women, Carol F. Karlsen, The Devil in the Shape of
a Woman: Witchcraft in Colonial New England
(New York, 1987). I found news of the Second Indian War in the overwhelming majority of the letters (business or personal) written in New England between 1688 and 1692. Cedric Cowing places the witchcraft crisis in still another context, that of English regional migration patterns, by contending that both accusers and accused in Salem Village came largely from families with origins in the northwest of England, whereas the town leaders and judges had familial roots in the English southeast. See Cowing,
The
Saving Remnant: Religion and the Settling of New England
(Urbana, Ill., 1995), 77–108.

See Karlsen,
Devil in the Shape of a Woman,
chapter 7, esp. 226–28; and James E. Kences, “Some Unexplored Relationships of Essex County Witchcraft to the Indian Wars of 1675 and 1689,”
EIHC
120, no. 3 (1984): 179–212. More recently, John McWilliams, “Indian John and the Northern Tawnies,”
NEQ
69 (1996): 580–605, has addressed additional facets of the relationship. I largely concur with Kences and McWilliams, although in article-length studies they were barely able to scratch the surface of the subject, and both made a number of factual errors corrected herein. Typical of the brief treatments of the war in books on the witchcraft crisis are Hoffer, Devil’s Disciples, 55–56; and Hill, Delusion of Satan, 38–41. Richard Godbeer, The Devil’s Dominion: Magic and Religion in Early New
England
(New York, 1992), 184–86, 189–93, 199–201, devotes more pages to the subject than most. And see Emerson W. Baker and John G. Reid, The New
England Knight: Sir William Phips, 1651–1695
(Toronto, 1998), chapter 7, for a discussion of the links between Maine and the trials particularly relevant to the career of Massachusetts’ governor.

Other scholars, by contrast, have done so. Rosenthal,
Salem Story,
contends throughout that the accusers were liars and frauds, based on his assessment that they must have acted with rational forethought; Hoffer, Devil’s Disciples, cites modern child-sexual-abuse cases and studies of female juvenile delinquency; and Hill,
Delusion of Satan,
is unabashedly presentist in her concerns, referring both to Joseph McCarthy’s 1950s crusade against Communists in the federal government and to recent allegations of Satanic sexual abuse of children.

See David D. Hall,
Worlds of Wonder, Days of Judgment: Popular Religious
Belief in Early New England
(New York, 1989), passim, esp. chapter 2; Jon Butler, “Magic, Astrology, and the Early American Religious Heritage, 1600–1760,” American Historical Review 84 (1979): 317–46; and Godbeer, Devil’s Dominion, for surveys of the New Englanders’ worldview.

See Norton,
Founding Mothers & Fathers,
chapter 5 and passim, and Mary Beth Norton, “Gender and Defamation in Seventeenth-Century Maryland,”
WMQ,
3d ser., 44 (1987): 3–39, for extended discussions of the role of gossip in the seventeenth-century colonies. A study of gossip in the context of 1692 is Jesse Souweine, “Word of Mouth: How Gossip Informed the Salem Witchcraft Accusations” (unpub. honors thesis, American Studies, Cornell University, 1996).

Thus Le Beau,
Story of Salem Witch Trials,
organizes his narrative almost exclusively around the dates of examinations and trials; Rosenthal,
Salem Story,
uses execution dates. Other attempts to create chronologies (although constructed differently from mine) are Richard Gildrie, “Visions of Evil: Popular Culture, Puritanism, and the Massachusetts Witchcraft Crisis of 1692,”
Journal of American
Culture
8 (1985): 17–33; and McWilliams, “Indian John,”
NEQ
69 (1996): 580–605.

Thus, for example, Karlsen,
Devil in the Shape of a Woman,
dedicates two full chapters to exploring the economic and demographic patterns common to women accused of witchcraft, while devoting only a few pages to a comparable examination of accusers (226–31). Of the accused men, only three—John Proctor, George Burroughs, and Giles Corey—usually receive more than a passing mention. The same failure to pay much attention to accused men characterizes scholarship on European witchcraft as well; see, e.g., Deborah Willis,
Malevolent
Nurture: Witch-Hunting and Maternal Power in Early Modern England
(Ithaca, N.Y., 1995); Robin Briggs, Witches & Neighbors: The Social and Cultural Context of European Witchcraft (New York, 1996); and Brian P. Levack, The Witch-Hunt in
Early Modern Europe
(New York, 1987).