The Witches: Salem, 1692 (56 page)

STACY SCHIFF is the author of
Véra (Mrs. Vladimir Nabokov)
, winner of the Pulitzer Prize;
Cleopatra: A Life
, a #1 bestseller and winner of the PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for biography;
Saint-Exupéry
, a Pulitzer Prize finalist; and
A Great Improvisation: Franklin, France, and the Birth of America
, winner of the George Washington Book Prize and the Ambassador Book Award. Schiff has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library. The recipient of an Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, Schiff has contributed to
The New Yorker
, the
New York Times
, and the
Washington Post
, as well as many other publications. She lives in New York City.

Baker, Emerson W., and John G. Reid.
The New England Knight: Sir William Phips, 1651–1695
. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1998.

Boyer, Paul, and Stephen Nissenbaum.
Salem Possessed: The Social Origins of Witchcraft.
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1974.

———.
Salem-Village Witchcraft: A Documentary Record of Local Conflict in Colonial New England
. Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1993.

Burr, George Lincoln.
Narratives of the New England Witchcraft Cases
. Mineola, NY: Dover, 2002.

Cooper, James. F., Jr., and Kenneth P. Minkema.
The Sermon Notebook of Samuel Parris, 1689–1694
. Boston: Colonial Society of Massachusetts, 1993.

Demos, John.
The Enemy Within: 2,000 Years of Witch-Hunting in the Western World
. New York: Viking, 2008.

———.
Entertaining Salem: Witchcraft and the Culture of Early New England
. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004.

Dow, George Francis, ed.
The Records and Files of the Quarterly Courts of Essex County
. 9 vols. Essex Institute, 1911–1975.

Felt, James Barlow.
Annals of Salem
. 2 vols. Boston: James Munroe, 1845.

Gragg, Larry.
A Quest for Security: The Life of Samuel Parris
. New York: Greenwood, 1990.

Hall, David D.
The Faithful Shepherd: A History of the New England Ministry in the Seventeenth Century
. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006.

———.
Ways of Writing: The Practice and Politics of Text-Making in Seventeenth-Century New England
. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008.

———.
Worlds of Wonder, Days of Judgment: Popular Religious Belief in Early New England
. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990.

Hansen, Chadwick.
Witchcraft at Salem
. New York: George Braziller, 1969.

Harris, Marguerite L., et al.
John Hale: A Man Beset by Witches
. Beverly, MA: Hale Family Association, 1992.

Karlsen, Carol F.
The Devil in the Shape of a Woman: Witchcraft in Colonial New England
. New York: Norton, 1998.

Koehler, Lyle.
A Search for Power: The “Weaker Sex” in Seventeenth-Century New England
. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1980.

Konig, David Thomas.
Law and Society in Puritan Massachusetts
. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1981.

Mather, Cotton.
Diary of Cotton Mather
. 2 vols. New York: Frederick Ungar, 1911.

———.
Magnalia Christi Americana, or the Ecclesiastical History of New England
. Hartford, CT: Silas Andrus, 1820.

———.
Memorable Providences Relating to Witchcrafts and Possessions
. EEBO Editions, n.d.

———.
The Wonders of the Invisible World
. Forgotten Books, 2012.

Mather, Increase.
An Essay for the Recording of Illustrious Providences
. EEBO Editions, n.d.

Norton, Mary Beth.
In the Devil’s Snare: The Salem Witchcraft Crisis of 1692
. New York: Vintage, 2003.

Perley, Sidney.
The History of Salem, Massachusetts, 1626–1716
. 3 vols. Salem, MA, 1924.

“Perspectives on Witchcraft: Rethinking the Seventeenth-Century New England Experience,”
Essex Institute Historical Collections,
vols. 128 and 129, October 1992 and January 1993.

Phillips, James Duncan.
Salem in the Seventeenth Century
. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1933.

Roach, Marilynne K.
The Salem Witch Trials: A Day-by-Day Chronicle of a Community Under Siege
. Lanham, MD: Taylor Trade, 2004.

Rosenthal, Bernard.
Salem Story: Reading the Witch Trials of 1692
. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999.

Rosenthal, Bernard, et al., eds.
Records of the Salem Witch-Hunt
. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009.

Sewall, Samuel.
The Diary of Samuel Sewall
. 2 vols. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1973.

Sibley, John Langdon.
Biographical Sketches of Graduates of Harvard University in Cambridge, MA
. Vols. 2 and 3. Cambridge, MA: C. W. Sever, 1873–1885.

Silverman, Kenneth.
The Life and Times of Cotton Mather
. New York: Welcome Rain, 2002.

Silverman, Kenneth, ed.
Selected Letters of Cotton Mather
. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1971.

Stout, Harry S.
The New England Soul: Preaching and Religious Culture in Colonial New England
. New York: Oxford, 1986.

Thomas, Keith.
Religion and the Decline of Magic
. London: Penguin, 1991.

Thompson, Roger.
The Witches of Salem
. London: Folio Society, 1982.

Trask, Richard B.
“The Devil Hath Been Raised”: A Documentary History of the Salem Village Witchcraft Outbreak of March 1692
. Danvers, MA: Yeoman, 1997.

Upham, Charles W.
Salem Witchcraft
. 1867. Reprint, Mineola, NY: Dover, 2000.

Weisman, Richard.
Witchcraft, Magic, and Religion in Seventeenth-Century Massachusetts.
Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1984.

Three centuries of documentation can add up to as many pages of source notes. Volumes that have shaped the text as a whole or that I have consulted regularly appear in the selected bibliography; they are cited below by author’s last name and abbreviated title. Most accounts of 1692 have been printed and reprinted; I have tried to note them in their most readily accessible editions. The supporting seventeenth-century texts are available on Cornell University Library’s Witchcraft Collection website; most sermons are online; the bulk of the original Salem documentation can be found at the University of Virginia’s excellent Salem witch trials website. Principal sources—like the magisterial 2009
Records of the Salem Witch-Hunt,
which for the first time offers up the extant record chronologically, lending the hunt its shape—are rendered as follows:

Thomas Putnam—among the most prolific court reporters but by no means the most creative—alternately wrote “witch” and “wicth.” An apparition was an “apperishtion,”
a “daughter” a “dafter,” “melancholy” was “malloncely.” For readability’s sake I have modernized spellings and taken occasional liberties with punctuation. All proper names conform to the spellings in
Records of the Salem Witch-Hunt
. John Hale, Cotton Mather, Increase Mather, and Samuel Parris are abbreviated as JH, CM, IM, and SP; NE is New England. Names of principal archives appear as follows:

“We will declare”: Anton Chekhov,
Letters on the Short Story, the Drama, and Other Literary Topics
(New York: Benjamin Blom, 1964), 8.

voodoo arrived later: The nineteenth-century historian was Charles W. Upham. For Tituba and the voodoo, Bernard Rosenthal, “Tituba,”
OAH Magazine of History
(July 2003), 48–50; Rosenthal,
Salem Story
, 10–31; Rosenthal, “Tituba’s Story,”
New England Quarterly
(June 1998): 190–203. On the educational eminence of Massachusetts: Lawrence A. Cremin,
American Education: The Colonial Experience
(New York: Harper and Row, 1970), 207. Gretchen Adams makes the fine point that the South supplied the witch-burning in the contentious 1850s:
The Specter of Salem
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), 95–96.

exact number: It is elusive, given mistaken identities and impartial records. Boyer and Nissenbaum, in
Salem Possessed
, put it at 141; Rosenthal,
Salem Story
, at 156; Emerson W. Baker, in
A Storm of Witchcraft
(New York: Oxford, 2015), at 169 or 172; Koehler,
Search for Power,
at 204. A contemporaneous account indicates that more than two hundred were accused. If so, far more documentation has been lost than we realize.

a careful chronicler:
Magnalia,
2: 411. It may have been a printer’s error.

Might you be a witch: R, 392; the guilty innocent, R, 145.

Nearly as many theories: Scholars have weighed in from every discipline. In lieu of a complete bibliography and among the best overviews of the immense literature: John Demos,
The Enemy Within
, 189–215; David D. Hall, “Witchcraft and the Literature of Interpretation,”
New England Quarterly
(June 1985): 253–81; John M. Murrin, “The Infernal Conspiracy of Indians and Grandmothers,”
Reviews in American History
(December 2003): 485–94; Trask,
“The Devil Hath Been Raised,”
x. For generational hostility, Demos,
Entertaining Salem;
for regional difference and ethnic hostility, Elinor Abbot,
Our Company Increases Apace
(Dallas: SIL International, 2007), and Richard Slotkin,
Regeneration Through Violence
(New York: Harper, 1996);
for economic hostility, Boyer and Nissenbaum,
Salem Possessed
; for residual, imported regional hostility, Cedric B. Cowing,
The Saving Remnant
(Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1995); for sexual hostility, Koehler,
Search for Power;
for an epidemic of encephalitis lethargica, Laurie Winn Carlson,
A Fever in Salem
(Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2000); for ergot, Linda R. Caporael, “Ergotism: The Satan Loosed in Salem?,”
Science
192 (April 1976): 21–26; for ecclesiastical strains, Richard Latner, “‘Here Are No Newters’: Witchcraft and Religious Discord in Salem Village and Andover,”
New England Quarterly
(March 2006): 92–122. Benjamin C. Ray debunks the neat east-west split conceived by Boyer and Nissenbaum in
Salem Possessed
in his “The Geography of Witchcraft Accusations in 1692 Salem Village,”
William and Mary Quarterly
65 (July 2008): 449–78. On taxes: Noel D. Johnson and Mark Koyama, “Taxes, Lawyers, and the Decline of Witch Trials in France,” MPRA, working paper no. 34266, October 2011; conspiracy, Enders A. Robinson,
The Devil Discovered: Salem Witchcraft 1692
(Prospect Heights, IL: Waveland, 1991). Emily Oster makes a case that frantic witch-hunting coincides with a little ice age in “Witchcraft, Weather, and Economic Growth in Renaissance Europe,”
Journal of Economic Perspectives
18 (Winter 2004): 215–28; the atmospheric conditions are from James Sullivan,
The History of the District of Maine
(Boston: Thomas and Andrews, 1795), 212. Ask today’s female reenactors at Plimoth Plantation what they consider the most punishing month of the year; without hesitation, they will say February.

“There are departments”: Chadwick Hansen, “Andover Witchcraft and the Causes of the Salem Witchcraft Trials,” in
The Occult in America,
ed. Howard Kerr and Charles Crow (Urbana: University of Illinois, 1983), 53.

“with more purity”: Nicholas Noyes,
New-England’s Duty and Interest to Be an Habitation of Justice and Mountain of Holiness
(Boston, 1698).

“New English Israel”: CM,
Small Offers Towards the Service of the Tabernacle in the Wilderness
(Boston, 1689).

what offended them: The “resistance to something” trope is from Henry Adams. See Stephen Innes,
Creating the Commonwealth: The Economic Culture of Puritan New England
(New York: W. W. Norton, 1995), 312.

“neither drive a bargain”: Edward J. Ward,
Boston in 1682 and 1699: A Trip to New England
(Providence, RI: Club for Colonial Reprints, 1905), 54. Sewall and the courtship: SS
Diary,
2: 966. New Hampshire’s lieutenant governor: John Usher Papers, Ms. N-2071, 102, MHS. Danforth cites Saint John the Baptist in Roger Thompson,
Cambridge Cameos
(Boston: New England Historic Genealogical Society, 2005), 146. The prisoner is from Perley,
History of Salem,
3: 186; the killer cat from R, 436; the ax in the hand (testimony in both cases against Susannah Martin) from R, 276.

church went flying: Ola Elizabeth Winslow,
Meetinghouse Hill
(New York: Macmillan, 1952), 54.

very different dark: No one is better on the subject than A. Roger Ekirch,
At Day’s Close: A History of Nighttime
(London: Weidenfeld, 2005). I am grateful to John Demos for having called my attention to the book. Also for a sense of the wilderness among modern sources: Peter N. Carroll,
Puritanism and the Wilderness
(New York:
Columbia University Press, 1969); William Cronon,
Changes in the Land
(New York: Hill and Wang, 1983); John R. Stilgoe,
Common Landscape of America
(New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1982). The rabid hog: R, 359. Very often in the literature New Englanders refer to themselves as “ear-witnesses”; words—and sound—reigned supreme.

agents had stolen them:
CM Diary,
1: 171–73. Outwitting the devil, he preached without them from memory. It was September 1693; CM had journeyed to Salem in part to see to it “that the complete history of the late witchcrafts and possessions might not be lost.”

rest of the Bible intact: John Hull,
The Diaries of John Hull
(Boston: John Wilson, 1857), 231.

“diseases of astonishment”: CM in Burr, 101.

“peevish and touchy”: John Bowle, ed.,
The Diary of John Evelyn
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983), 2: 235. For a fine account of that “restrained hostility,” Michael Garibaldi Hall,
Edward Randolph and the American Colonies, 1676–1703
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1960).

venerable Salem minister: John Higginson to his son, August 31, 1692, Fam. Mss. 433, Higginson Family Papers, PEM; Norton,
In the Devil’s Snare,
13, maintains that SP burned his notes.

“a very wicked, spiteful manner”: R, 127. On the multiply authored testimonies and records, their transcriptions and lacunae, see especially Marion Gibson,
Reading Witchcraft: Stories of Early English Witches
(London: Routledge, 1999); Peter Grund’s superb “From Tongue to Text: The Transmission of the Salem Witchcraft Records,”
American Speech
82 (Summer 2007): 119–50;
Studia Neophilologica
84 (2012), in particular essays by Matti Peikola, Matti Rissanen, Leena Kahlas-Tarkka; Grund et al., “Editing the Salem Witchcraft Records: An Exploration of a Linguistic Treasury,”
American Speech
79 (Summer 2004): 146–67; Grund, “The Anatomy of Correction,”
Studia Neophilologica
79 (2007): 3–14.

“I will tell”: R, 196–97.

minister at odds: Samuel Willard,
A Compleat Body of Divinity
(Boston: B. Green, 1726), 627.