The Enemy Within (19 page)

These three elements, then, did much to shape the profile of witchcraft cases over time. Harms and signs were both predisposing to witchcraft, usually within a year or so after their occurrence. (Epidemics, in particular, seem to have preceded witch trials with some regularity.) Conflict was more ambivalent in its effects. In the moment of its actual happening, it would usually serve to suppress (or divert) concern with witchcraft; the energies it evoked were at least temporarily all-consuming. In its aftermath, however, the flow might easily turn back the other way, as guilt began to fuel an anxious search for scapegoats. To be sure, all such links, as seen from several centuries later on, are more a matter of correlation than demonstrable cause and effect. Moreover, the presence of one element by itself would not ordinarily prove efficacious. But with a convergence of two, three, or more, the likelihood of witch-hunting did indeed increase dramatically.

The Connecticut witchcraft panic of the 1660s can serve as a case in point. Between 1656 and 1660, several of the colony's leading towns plunged into religious dispute—and, for exactly that same period, experienced a complete respite from witch trials. Then, at the start of the next decade, the dispute was settled (largely because the members of one faction chose to relocate northward into Massachusetts); presumably, though, residues of guilty soul-searching remained or even increased. Moreover, springtime in 1661 brought a succession of damaging floods to the entire Connecticut River Valley, plus a virulent outbreak of influenza-like “fevers”; both were widely interpreted as punishing “frowns” of the Lord. The next year was the first of several in which a killing summertime crop blight overspread New England's farms. And in 1664 came a dramatic “blazing star” (comet) thought to foretell yet more “great and dreadful” events. These were, finally, years full of witch-hunting in Connecticut, beginning (as noted above) in Hartford and then radiating out into three or four adjacent communities. From the troubled aftermath of conflict, to providential “frowns” and “signs,” to the Devil let loose in their midst: thus, for people of the time, the essential, and “awful,” progression.

Listen to Cotton Mather, as he forged his own chain of connections: “I believe there never was a poor plantation more pursued . . . than our New England. . . . First, the Indian
powwaws . . .
Then
seducing spirits . . .
After this a continual
blast
upon some of our principal grains . . . Herewithal wasting
sicknesses . . .
Next many adversaries of our own language . . . Desolating
fires
also . . . And
losses
by sea . . . Besides all which . . . the devils are come down upon us with such a wrath as is justly . . . the astonishment of the world.” Mather wrote this in 1693, under the direct shadow of the Salem trials, but his perspective was that of New England's entire history to date. And now we must ask—as he did—
why?
Why was this one region so much more deeply preoccupied with witchcraft than any of its neighbors? Mather's answer was sure: “If any are scandalized that New England, a place of as serious piety as any I can hear of under Heaven, should be troubled with so many witches, I think 'tis no wonder: where will the Devil show the most malice but where he is hated, and hateth, most?”

Such claims to “serious piety” should be accepted. Though never completely homogeneous in this or any other regard, New Englanders did conform their life patterns to religious principle in ways quite extraordinary even by the standard of their own time. Their church-going, their spiritual “watchfulness,” their sense of transcendent “mission”: such things truly set them apart, and raised the stakes of moral value—for witchcraft and much else. The Devil, in his unceasing quest to control the universe, might be anywhere around them (or among them); thus, against his “wiles” they must be ever vigilant.

Alongside their own explanation for New England's preeminence in witch-hunting, we may add another yielded by hindsight. Nowhere else in colonial America was the social web so tightly enveloping. To the south (Virginia, for example), settlement was widely dispersed, in direct antithesis to New England's typical nucleated-village plan. In the middle colonies (New York, Pennsylvania), clustered communities more generally prevailed but lacked New England's intensely intramural focus. Only in Cotton Mather's “poor plantation”—poor, yet proudly self-congratulating—was there such interactive pressure and density. “We must be knit together,” John Winthrop had said long before; and so, for the most part, they were. In this context especially, witchcraft seemed plausible, if not quite a logical necessity. For witchcraft coupled one important category of events—sudden misfortune, loss, suffering—with a critical nexus of
personal
and
social,
no less than supernatural, forces.

 
As the 17th century's final decade began, New Englanders were feeling sorely beset by events both near at hand and far away. On the political front, a seven-year sequence of jolting changes was still in process; its effect was to challenge, and ultimately to reduce, the region's autonomy. Further upheaval seemed likely though hard to predict; hence, the outlook was, to say the least, unsettling. On the military front, the major European powers, together with their various colonial possessions, were at war. In America this meant New England versus New France (Canada), with sharp, if sporadic, bursts of fighting throughout the wilderness borderlands; targets particularly included English villages in Maine, New Hampshire, and New York, several of which suffered devastating surprise attacks.

And then came a renewal of witchcraft. Accusations surfaced—though without producing full-fledged trials—in Boston (1689 and 1691), New Haven (1689), and Northampton (1691). In 1692 a more significant outbreak gripped the coastal Connecticut towns of Stamford and Fairfield; indeed, for a time this one approached panic dimensions. It began in March, in the household of a locally prominent family, when a servant-girl named Katherine Branch suddenly “fell into fits.” The details conformed to long-established precedent: wild physical contortions, trance, fainting spells, “naughty” words and looks, spectral confrontations with the Devil—all in the presence of numerous enthralled onlookers—and with the naming, finally, of supposed witch “tormentors.” No fewer than six women were thus brought under suspicion. A special court was convened, and dozens of witnesses offered testimony as to their own dealings with the accused; following more lengthy precedent, they reported quarrels, threats made and received, cows that died strangely, “injuries” of every sort. The proceedings continued throughout the summer months, in an atmosphere of mounting acrimony and excitement. Local townsfolk divided into opposite camps, with some supporting, others doubting (or rejecting outright) the main charges. The doubters included several members of the court and a group of ministers whose opinion was sought and given. In the end their viewpoint prevailed; only two of the original six suspects were indicted, and the trial jury convicted but one. She, in turn, was eventually “reprieved” by a committee of magistrates.

But at almost exactly the same moment that Katherine Branch plunged into fits, something similar was gradually taking shape 100 miles off to the north, where a group of impressionable young girls had a notion to “try fortunes,” hoping thereby to learn something of future husbands, by using an age-old divining trick of dropping an egg white into a glass and decoding the patterns it formed. Except that the appearance, this time, was not of husbands but of “a specter in likeness of a coffin,” a sure token of death—leading, then, to shock and terror and “strange antics” and whispered accusations. All in a place with the softly beautiful, biblical name of . . . Salem.

CHAPTER VI

 
But who were Mary Parsons and Sarah Bridgman? And what chain of experiences had brought them to such a bitter point of confrontation? First, Mary.

She was born Mary Bliss, in England, around the year 1628. Her father, Thomas, belonged to a large, well-to-do, and influential family in the town of Belstone, Devonshire. There, in the first decades of the 17th century, the Blisses had joined the Puritan movement—had indeed become local leaders of the movement. For this they would eventually suffer irreparable harm to their fortune and social position. According to later reports, several of the Bliss men-folk, including Mary's father, were imprisoned after mounting a series of open challenges to the established church leadership. Additional punishment took the form of heavy fines, which greatly reduced the family patrimony. Eventually, in about 1635, a considerable number of them decided to leave home and join the exodus of their fellow Puritans to New England.

The group included Thomas, his wife Margaret, their daughter Mary, and three or four of their other children; Mary was now around seven years old. Thomas and family went first to what is today Braintree, Massachusetts, and then, by or before 1640, to Hartford, Connecticut. Hartford would remain their base for at least a decade, while Mary and her siblings grew to adulthood. Thomas died within a few years; Margaret began a long period of widowhood. Their position and property was “middling” at best, showing no hint of the Blisses' previously high rank in England. But in 1646 Mary met and married Joseph Parsons, and this marked another turning point.

Parsons lived 20 miles to the north along the Connecticut River, near Springfield, Massachusetts, where Mary joined him. He was, by all accounts, an unusually resourceful young man on the make: initially a farmer, but also drawn to “mercantile” pursuits. In 1654 Joseph and Mary moved again, still farther upriver to Northampton. There Joseph would quickly assume a role of prominence, holding numerous public offices, including those of “cornet” (leader of the local militia) and town selectman. There, too, his activities in trade and commerce would greatly expand. He opened a retail store, owned and operated at least two mills, ran an ordinary, bought and sold lands at a rapid rate, and, perhaps most important, developed a vigorous fur trade with the nearby Indians. Eventually, the range of his enterprise would extend through all the Connecticut Valley towns and eastward to the coast. In 1675 he bought a large warehouse and ship's wharf in Boston—for by now much of his trade was overseas—and obtained the privileges of a merchant in that city.