Nineteen people executed, one man pressed to death during interrogation, and four others perished in gaol. This was the human toll of the Salem witch trials of 1692. Many more were bereaved and traumatized, and a community was left counting the economic, social, spiritual, and moral costs. It all began with the antics of two young girls, the daughter and niece of Samuel Parris, the minister of Salem Village. Within months over 150 people from twenty-four different towns were being investigated for witchcraft. As historians have shown, though, the development of the Salem witch trials was as much a story of the multiple tensions of a developing colonial community as the result of the terrible lies of adolescent girls and prejudices of the male Puritan authorities.
The Salem trials resulted in the last of the estimated thirty-eight to forty executions for witchcraft recorded in the British colony.1 Without the Salem toll the record of official persecution of witches in America would have been mild compared with much of Europe. To say Salem was an aberration, though, would be to misrepresent the popular fear and hatred of witches at the time. This did not diminish despite the changing legal response to witchcraft following Salem. After years of petitioning by those who had suffered, on 17 October 1711 the Massachusetts legislature reversed the guilty verdicts of twenty-two of those convicted and paid hundreds of pounds in compensation to their families. The days of the witch trials seemed to be over: its victims now the righteous, and their persecutors the shamed.
Through schooling and the media the events of 1692 are etched into the consciousness of modem America. The date, like 1776 and 1865, brings to a close a chapter in the annals of the country’s development. The end of the Salem trials, and the immediate soul searching in its aftermath, mark the beginning of the American enlightenment. Over the ensuing centuries Salem served as a metaphor for bigotry, intolerance, religious fanaticism, persecution, popular credulity, personal ambition, and the dangers of mob rule. As the decades passed, it was also used as a milepost to measure the distance America had progressed from a benighted colonial past. During the nineteenth century, ‘Remember Salem!’ became a term of antiquarian abuse, a playground game of name calling—‘Our colonial founders were more level-headed and enlightened than yours!’ State historians rummaged through the archives and were satisfied to find themselves well down the witch- trial league table. The near absence of witch trials in Connecticut turned its early historians into enthusiastic fmger-waggers gesturing in the direction of their northern neighbours.2
The cry of ‘Salem!’ was frequently heard in the rivalry between North and South, a rhetorical weapon used by the latter to attack New Englanders and their perceived sense of superiority over the southern states and their defence of the barbarity of slavery. ‘When a Virginian is in his most unwholesome frame of mind against the “Yankees,” he is apt to refer, in terms either derisive or denunciatory, to the New England trials and executions for witchcraft’, sighed one commentator in 1869. Another, complaining of the censorship laws in Virginia, warned, ‘let her never talk of the hanging of witches by Massachusetts’.3 In 1919, the South Carolina state historian Alexander Samuel Salley Jr made a barbed comment during a spat over what was the last witch trial in America, suggesting that, ‘the early settlers of South Carolina were governed by educated and cultivated officials, and witchcraft and other forms of fanaticism were frowned upon’. The implication was obvious.4
Then there was the desire amongst some Massachusetts communities to seek collective forgiveness for a stain on their state’s history. In 1852 Jonathan Waite, a 54-year-old woollen manufacturer of North Brookfield, presented a petition to the Massachusetts legislature requesting that monuments be erected to those who were executed for witchcraft in Salem. The proposal was not taken up, but the idea was revived in 1875 when the descendants of one of the victims, Rebecca Nourse, met in the New England Genealogical Rooms, Boston, to plan a fundraising campaign for a monument to commemorate her death. The Nourse Monument Association was founded and raised over $520, enough for a monument to be erected in 1885 at the Nourse ancestral home in Danvers (formerly Salem village). An impressive ceremony was held on the 30 July to mark its completion, at which Danvers’ pastor, the
Reverend Fielder Israel, gave an opening address in which he said their witchhanging forebears had ‘an over-wrought belief concerning religious subjects which their ignorance furthered’. He concluded by considering how far Danvers had come since 1692: ‘What has caused such wonderful changes? It is the development of a Christian people. The past, with its deeds, is buried: we would not remove the veil of mystery that hides it if we could; we are content with the present and our hopes for the future. Let the dead rest in peace’.5
So, much of the discourse on Salem through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries assumed that the history of witchcraft ended with Salem. The veil was conveniently drawn and tied fast. This book tears open the veil and reveals a very different story. The Salem nineteen were the last to be legally executed for witchcraft in the colony, yet we now know of more people killed as witches in America after 1692 than before it.
For many in late colonial and independent America, witches remained a real and terrible threat. For them, Salem was not a horrific miscarriage of justice. In 1787 the Philadelphia City Sessions of the Mayor’s Court heard the case of a woman who died after being brutally treated by a mob who accused her of witchcraft. Five years later a German woman, aged around seventy, was one of four people who were subjected to violent popular justice in Fairfield County, South Carolina, under suspicion of witchcraft. They launched suits against their assaulters in the county court and won nominal damages.6 Then in 1796 the Court of Common Pleas and General Sessions of the Peace for the County of York, Maine, dealt with a vicious case of assault and battery against a suspected witch.7 Historians have known for a long time about these cases that emerge from the ‘shadow of the Enlightenment’, but they have usually been treated as the last gasp of an old world mentality, exceptional events resulting from lingering superstition.8 As this book will show, though, if anything, witchcraft disputes multiplied as hundreds of thousands of immigrants poured into North America from Europe. These were people who knew nothing of the history of Salem, and for whom witchcraft was still a heinous crime. Witch trials and executions continued into the 1770s in some German states, and the last legal executions for witchcraft took place in Glarus, Switzerland, in 1782, and in Posen, Poland, in 1793.9 With the influx of new immigrants and the ongoing challenges faced by the settled population, the history of witchcraft in America was entering a new and not a final phase.