Publisher Description

The Salem Witchcraft Crisis of 1692Award-winning historian Mary Beth Norton reexamines the Salem witch trials in this startlingly original, meticulously researched, and utterly riveting study.In 1692 the people of Massachusetts were living in fear, and not solely of satanic afflictions. Horrifyingly violent Indian attacks had all but emptied the northern frontier of settlers, and many traumatized refugees-including the main accusers of witches-had fled to communities like Salem. Meanwhile the colony's leaders, defensive about their own failure to protect the frontier, pondered how God's people could be suffering at the hands of savages. Struck by the similarities between what the refugees had witnessed and what the witchcraft "victims" described, many were quick to see a vast conspiracy of the Devil (in league with the French and the Indians) threatening New England on all sides. By providing this essential context to the famous events, and by casting her net well beyond the borders of Salem itself, Norton sheds new light on one of the most perplexing and fascinating periods in our history.

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Award-winning historian Mary Beth Norton reexamines the Salem witch trials in this startlingly original, meticulously researched, and utterly riveting study. In 1692 the people of Massachusetts were living in fear, and not solely of satanic afflictions. Horrifyingly violent Indian attacks had all but emptied the northern frontier of settlers, and many traumatized refugees-including the main accusers of witches-had fled to communities like Salem. Meanwhile the colony's leaders, defensive about their own failure to protect the frontier, pondered how God's people could be suffering at the hands of savages. Struck by the similarities between what the refugees had witnessed and what the witchcraft "victims" described, many were quick to see a vast conspiracy of the Devil (in league with the French and the Indians) threatening New England on all sides. By providing this essential context to the famous events, and by casting her net well beyond the borders of Salem itself, Norton sheds new light on one of the most perplexing and fascinating periods in our history.

Author Biography

Mary Beth Norton is Mary Donlon Alger Professor of American History at Cornell University. She is the author of The British-Americans- The Loyalist Exiles in England, 1774-1789 (1972); Liberty's Daughters- The Revolutionary Experience of American Women, 1750-1800 (1980); Founding Mothers & Fathers- Gendered Power and the Forming of American Society (1996), which was a Pulitzer Prize finalist; and (with five others) A People and a Nation (6th ed., 2001). She has also edited several works on women's history and served as the general editor of The AHA Guide to Historical Literature (3rd ed., 1995).

Review

"Stunning. . . . A rabble-rouser of a book." –The New York Times Book Review

"Fresh and persuasively argued. . . . Norton builds her case with the precision of a criminal prosecutor. . . . Her conclusion is forceful." –Boston Globe

"The freshest, and most detailed account . . . that we have had in a decade. . . . A landmark achievement. It may well herald a new golden age in American history." –Los Angeles Times

Review Quote

"Stunning. . . . A rabble-rouser of a book." The New York Times Book Review "Fresh and persuasively argued. . . . Norton builds her case with the precision of a criminal prosecutor. . . . Her conclusion is forceful." Boston Globe "The freshest, and most detailed account . . . that we have had in a decade. . . . A landmark achievement. It may well herald a new golden age in American history." Los Angeles Times

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The Salem Witchcraft Crisis of 1692

Excerpt from Book

CHAPTER ONE Under an Evil Hand January 15-March 6, 1691/2 Monday, January 25, 1691/2; York, Maine. About noon, in heavy snow, when (in the words of a contemporary historian) "the Inhabitants were in their unguarded Houses, here and there scattered, Quiet and Secure," about 150 Indians led by Madockawando, a sachem of the Penobscot band of the Wabanakis, took York completely by surprise. One by one they captured most of the town''s garrisoned houses and split into small parties to burn houses and to kill livestock and people. Captain John Floyd, who with a small troop of militia rushed to the scene from Portsmouth, New Hampshire, found on his arrival that "the greatest part of the whole town was burned & robed," with nearly 50 killed and another 100 captured. Among the dead was the Reverend Shubael Dummer, who was, Floyd reported, "barbarously murthered stript naked Cut & mangled by these sons of Beliall." The Indians seemed to have known when and where to strike, and help had arrived much too late.1 From the neighboring town of Wells, the Reverend George Burroughs described "the Sorrowfull tideings" from York for the leaders of Massachusetts. "The beholding of the Pillours of Smoke, the rageing of the mercyless flames, the insultations of the heathen enemy, shooting, hacking, (not haveing regard to the earnest supplication of men, women, or Children, with sharpe cryes & bitter teares in most humble manner,) & dragging away others, (& none to help) is most affecting the heart." Burroughs concluded that "God is still manifesting his displeasure against this Land, he who formerly hath set to his hand to help us, doth even write bitter things against us."2 When he wrote that letter George Burroughs would not have known that about a week before the attack on York, two little girls living in the house of the Reverend Samuel Parris in Salem Village--a house Burroughs had once occupied--had begun to have strange fits. Nor, unless he had the occult powers eventually attributed to him, would he have known that as a result just three months later he too would personally experience "bitter things." SALEM VILLAGE In the winter of 1691-1692, Salem Village, a thinly populated rural precinct bordering the crowded, bustling seaport of Salem Town, simmered with contention, much of it revolving around the church. Its pastor, the Reverend Samuel Parris, had become the focal point for considerable discontent, which his actions in the coming months would magnify rather than dampen. Indeed, the strange behavior of the girls in his household beginning in mid-January would, as he later reflected, set off a "horrid calamity (which afterwards, plague-like, spread in many other places)."3 Land grants in the mid to late 1630s had initiated movement into the area that eventually became known as Salem Village, which was located north and west of the town center. Salem, the first permanent settlement in the Massachusetts Bay Colony, was founded in 1626 on a peninsula commanding a superb natural harbor, and the town quickly became the focal point of the area around Cape Ann. Immigrants flowed in during the 1630s, and furs and fish flowed out. The newcomers moved inland to found new towns and to settle in Salem''s own hinterland, first referred to simply as "the Farms."4 As the decades passed, friction developed between the Town and the Farms. Residents of Salem Town wanted the tax revenues contributed by residents of the Farms; for their part, the Farmers, though usually outvoted by the more numerous Town dwellers, sought to avoid civic obligations in the distant Town. By the early 1670s the Farmers'' fight for greater autonomy focused on their desire to build their own meetinghouse and to support their own minister. Like other residents of outlying areas of colonial New England settlements, they complained of the long weekly journey to the town center to attend church services, arguing that they should be able to establish their own parish. In October 1672 the Massachusetts General Court agreed to their request. For years thereafter, however, Salem Town still claimed the right to assess Farmers for ecclesiastical expenses, and the Farms, later Salem Village, did not become the independent town of Danvers until 1752.5 Ironically, the long-sought meetinghouse and minister--the subject of so much contention with Salem Town--also proved to be a major source of discord within Salem Village itself. Whether because strife in the Village came to focus on the church or because the Villagers made inappropriate choices of clergymen, each of the first four ministers who served the Village failed to earn consistent support from his parishioners. The first minister, James Bayley--a young Harvard graduate when hired in 1672--lasted the longest, until 1680. George Burroughs, who had fled Falmouth, Maine, in 1676, during the First Indian War, succeeded Bayley, but in early 1683 agreed to return to his former congregation. Deodat Lawson, an English immigrant, served in Salem Village only from 1684 to 1688; in the winter of 1688-1689 he ministered to troops on a campaign against the Indians in Maine, then settled in Boston. Finally, the Reverend Samuel Parris, whose ministry would prove the most controversial of them all, was hired in June 1689 and resigned approximately seven years later after a long and bitter struggle within the Village. Thus when one of the Andover men who confessed to witchcraft in the late summer of 1692 explained to the examining magistrates that the devil and his witches had targeted Salem Village for destruction "by reason of the peoples being divided & theire differing with their ministers," no one would have been surprised by his statement.6 Paul Boyer and Stephen Nissenbaum have argued persuasively that the Village was so contentious because of its anomalous status, neither wholly independent of nor wholly dependent on Salem Town. "Structural defects in its organization," they observe, "rendered the Village almost helpless in coping with whatever disputes might arise." The two hundred or so adult residents of Salem Village, in short, did not differ from settlers in other New England towns in being more cantankerous, but rather in not having any local means of resolving their quarrels. Deprived of formal decision-making bodies controlled by Villagers, they always had to appeal to outside authorities--to Salem Town, to the General Court, to synods of ministers, to arbitrators or mediators--to achieve solutions to their conflicts. Furthermore, persistent boundary disputes with neighboring towns kept tempers flaring on all sides.7 When some Villagers formally organized a church in November 1689, leading to Samuel Parris''s ordination by neighboring clergy, they added fuel to the fire. Parris, born in England but raised largely in Barbados, attended Harvard for several years in the early 1670s but before completing his studies returned to Barbados to settle his deceased father''s estate. After failing to establish himself as a merchant first in Barbados and later, in the 1680s, in Boston, he accepted the post as Salem Village pastor and sought ordination.8 Before his arrival, although successive Village ministers preached regularly to the congregation, the precinct had no "church" as Puritans understood it--a covenanted body of saints selected from the wider community. A clergyman could only be ordained by a church, and only an ordained clergyman could administer communion to its members or baptize babies. The organization of a church, with twenty-six original members in addition to Parris himself, created a formal, lasting division in the ranks of Villagers. Nothing more dramatically symbolized that division than the dismissal of nonmembers from the meetinghouse after the sermon on sacrament days, before the members took communion together. Adding to the exclusionary atmosphere was the church''s decision in early 1690 to reject the so-called Halfway Covenant, which permitted the baptism of infants born to parents who had themselves been baptized but who had not formally joined a church. In Salem Village, the much-desired sacrament of infant baptism, already denied to those Villagers who did not belong to other nearby churches, would be limited to children who had at least one church-member parent. In his sermons, Parris likewise tended to stress the sharp distinctions between church members and other folk. Perhaps understandably, therefore, by late 1691 discontent with Parris''s ministry permeated the nearly three-fourths of adult Villagers who had not joined the local church. That discontent took the form of refusing to contribute to his salary or to supply him with firewood, and of organizing for his removal. Parris responded primarily by sharpening his attacks on his opponents.9 Beginning in November 1691, Samuel Parris preached a sermon series on the first verse of Psalm 110: "Sit thou at my right hand, till I make thine enemies thy footstool." Emphasizing spiritual warfare between the saved and the damned, he told his congregation on January 3, 1691/2, that "the Church is separated from the world," and that "it is the main drift of the Devil to pull it all down." The devil, he asserted, was "the grand enemy of the Church," assisted by "Wicked & Reprobate men," presumably including his many detractors in Salem Village.10 That was the last sacrament-day sermon Parris''s nine-year-old daughter Betty and his somewhat older niece Abigail Williams heard before they began to behave strangely.11 "SADLY AFFLICTED" A few days after January 15, Abigail Williams fell ill. Her cousin Betty may have sickened first or, more likely, soon thereafter.12 In any event, Samuel Parris, his wife Elizabeth, and other observers quickly realiz

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