Looking back at Seventeenth Century colonial America, several key events grab the imagination. The founding of Jamestown, the voyage of the Pilgrims, the first Thanksgiving, Bacon's Rebellion, and the establishment of slavery all call great attention to themselves. One occurrence, however, lurks in the dark days of the early 1690s. That event is the Salem witch trials of 1692. This episode stands out among the others as a brutal and backward looking mistake in course of American history. The history of this period is indeed tragic, but, nevertheless, it still inspires great interest. How an event like this could happen less than one hundred years before the Revolution is a fascinating but elusive question. Medieval witchcraft beliefs, powerful sexism, Village rivalries, and a society in flux are all partial answers to the question, but none of them alone can answer it. To find the true cause of the Salem witch trials, one must fit all these strands together like a jigsaw puzzle. In doing this, it becomes obvious that this unfortunate episode is one of the most complex in colonial American history.

Going back to the medieval period, witchcraft was traditionally defined as misfortune caused by a magical adult agency, overwhelmingly women. The types of misfortunes a witch could cause, collectively called "maleficium," could range from such things as causing beer or cheese to spoil, the family cow drying up, to actually causing the deaths of people.2 Many people believed that witches made a covenant with the Devil, from whom they acquired their magic powers. It was possible, however, for common folk to find some sort of mark on a witches body which indicated her alliance with the Devil. Very often, this mark would be the so-called "witch's teat," which was some sort of extra nipple from which familiars of the witch could nurse. It is important to remember that the common view of the witch, the one who caused your baby to die or your cheese to spoil, was subtly different from the theological witch, who signed a contract with the Devil, possibly slept with him, and participated in Witch's Sabbaths. In the English tradition, while the definitions often blurred, the malefic witch stood out far more than the theological witch.3 After the Reformation, fear of the Devil tremendously increased in England. Most Englishmen believed in a physical, tangible Devil. One Englishman believed that the Devil was the "prince and God of this world."4 This historical tradition of witchcraft beliefs is the first piece of our puzzle.

While witchcraft was both a traditional concept and a theological concept, it was also a legal concept. In the English tradition, the first statute against witchcraft was implemented in 1542. However this statute was repealed in 1547, only to see a new statute issued in 1563, called an "Act agaynst Conjuracions Inchantments and Witchcraftes." This act, too, was repealed in 1604, when a new and more brutal act against witchcraft was passed. The 1604 act remained in force until 1736. If found guilty under the 1604 statute, the sentence was death, unlike under some of the earlier statutes, where more lenient punishments could have been granted.5 The legal background of witchcraft is a very important piece of the puzzle of Salem.

Before we move on to New England and Salem, we must see the episode in perspective. While ultimately twenty people were killed in Salem, over ten thousand people were executed for witchcraft in Europe during the Sixteenth and Seventeenth centuries alone. In looking back at the Salem episode, it is sobering to remember that the Salem affair was only the "tip of the iceberg."6

With the English background in mind, we must now examine the attributes of witchcraft in New England. As in England, the typical witch was female, but there were many other characteristics that went into the making up of a witch. A New England witch tended to be a woman who was middle aged and of "humble" social status. She was either married or widowed, and they often were "somewhat less fecund" than other women. Added to this was the fact that most accused witches, male and female, had disagreeable or self-assertive personalities.7 It was this type of person who was first accused of witchcraft in Salem.

One of the most important aspects of the woman-witch, one that would figure prominently in the Salem trials, had to do with property. Despite several New England laws that clearly specified male inheritance of property, several women in Salem owned property or stood to own property. The female property owner upset the Puritan social order, and made these women vulnerable to witchcraft accusations.8 All over New England, but in Salem in particular, conflicts between sons who believed that the real property of their deceased fathers was theirs, and widows who held that property (or whose new husbands held it) could and often did cause a great deal of resentment. These conflicts only contributed to the witch craze in Salem.9

While the events in Salem are familiar, a brief review of the episode is in order. It began quietly in the kitchen of the Reverend Samuel Parris, in Salem Village, Massachusetts; a group of young girls and a slave from the Caribbean named Tituba, were trying to determine what their future husbands would be like. Utilizing a primitive crystal ball, the girls saw something that terrified them: "a specter in the likeness of a coffin." Soon the girls began to experience "odd postures," "foolish, ridiculous speeches," "distempers," and "fits." While at first Parris and others sought medical explanations, they soon determined that the girls were under the spells of witches. The girls initially gave up three names, Tituba, Sarah Good, and Sarah Osbourne, all of whom roughly corresponded to the usual conception of a witch. While the others denied the charges, Tituba soon confessed, and the women were locked up. However, the girls' fits did not stop. Ministers came to examine the situation, which appeared to cause the girls even more fits.

As the Spring went on, more people became afflicted, and more people were accused of witchcraft. The Salem jail began to fill with witches, and the social status of the witches began to increase. With the growing number of prisoners, the accusations began to move out of Salem Village, and into surrounding communities. It became clear that it was no longer a local affair. When the new governor, Sir William Phips, arrived on May 14, 1692 (with a new charter for the colony of Massachusetts), he implemented the Court of Oyer and Terminer to try the witchcraft cases. The first trial it conducted, that of Bridget Bishop, returned a guilty verdict, and on June 10, Bishop was hanged. The trials dragged on throughout the summer, and when they finally ended in September, due to the direct intervention of several Massachusetts ministers, and Governor Phips, there had been 141 accusations, and twenty people were dead.10 Part of the reason that the trials were eventually stopped was that the accusers began to accuse people whose status and piety was so firmly established that people no longer believed them.11

To begin to fit together the pieces of Salem's puzzle, we will start with the afflicted people. What exactly was happening to them? They were believed to be possessed. The question of what was happening to the afflicted people was just as perplexing to contemporaries as it is to modern historians. The Reverend Deodat Lawson, who had previously been the minister at Salem Village, described how the afflicted girls would claim to be tempted to sign the Devil's "Book," they asserted that the touch of the accused witch would halt their fits, they said that they could see the witches "suckling their familiars," when no one else could, and other typical accusations.12 Lawson also claimed that the accused did not need to use puppets and other traditional charms to invoke their magic.13

It is possible that the afflicted were experiencing some type of mental aberration which caused their Seventeenth Century contemporaries to deduce witchcraft. However, this conclusion leads to a conclusion of a "mass psychopathology." The problem certainly had to do with inner conflicts within the afflicted, but the idea of a mass mental illness not only ignores previous witchcraft trials, but witchcraft outbreaks in other societies.14

Ergotism is another explanation of exactly what the afflicted persons were going through in 1692. Briefly, ergotism is a disorder which comes from eating contaminated rye bread, which was prevalent in Salem. Ergot contains some elements of lysergic acid diethylamide, or LSD, and it is alleged that this element caused very vivid hallucinations which were interpreted as possession.15 Indeed, it is alleged that the spectral evidence (the vision of a witch appearing to a possessed person) bears great similarity to ergot inspired hallucinations (although the author of this idea admits "there can never be hard proof for the presence of ergot in Salem....").16 While the idea of ergotism holds a certain appeal, it is an unsatisfactory answer to what was happening. In fact, when one remembers the thousands of accused witches in Europe, and the witchcraft cases in New England before Salem, the idea of ergotism cannot stand.17 Joseph Klaits, an historian of European witchcraft, states that the claims of ergotism rest on "a long chain of unlikely assumptions."18

A more plausible explanation has to do with psychology and physiology. Very often people do things for reasons unknown, even to themselves. The world of Salem was a world in which the existence and powers of demons and devils was rarely questioned. Events that were, at the time, unexplainable were often attributed to witchcraft. Anthropologists have observed similar possession behavior is many different cultures. Clinical hysteria exhibits many of the same kinds of behavior reported by the people of Salem. These kinds of behaviors (feelings of choking, being bitten, strange postures) can emerge in times of severe stress, which Salem Village was experiencing in 1692 (as will be discussed below). "If the ordinary means of coping [with emotions and stress] fail,... the unconscious takes over." Very often, neurotic stress can produce strange symptoms which cannot be traced to physical causes. It was the society that interpreted this behavior as possession. Approximately fifty years later, very similar behavior would be interpreted as a conversion experience.19

While it is true that what was happening to the afflicted people is an important piece of the puzzle, a more important piece has to do with those who interpreted what was happening. We have already seen that Rev. Lawson believed that the girls were possessed and that the accused had considerable magic power. He was not alone in this belief. The adults observing the afflicted people assumed witchcraft almost from the beginning. It is possible that if those adults had given a different interpretation of these events, the whole episode might never have happened.20

Since it was very easy for an accuser to become the accused, many people who had been accused of witchcraft in the past began to accuse others. In addition, if a person were to withdraw their accusation, they could be accused of witchcraft themselves. Therefore, the magistrates who presided over the trials both encouraged solidarity among the afflicted and they were a major cause of the fast expansion of accusations of witchcraft from outlying areas. Add to this a willingness to believe any accusation,21 and it becomes evident that the adults and magistrates play an extremely important part in the story.

To understand the most important piece of the puzzle, one must first realize that Salem was a divided community. It was divided into Salem Town, which was a port Town to the southeast, and Salem Village, bordering the Town, was a farm Town to the west. Founded in the 1630s, by 1672 the two communities were different socially and economically, but politically they were considered one unit. To worship, the Villagers had to travel to the Town, as the Village had no meeting house of its own. For many years the Village agitated for independence. The Town, however, which collected taxes from the Village, constantly managed to prevent it. By 1672, a compromise was reached: the Village could have its own meeting house and pastor, but it was still politically connected to the Town. This situation bred serious tension which would erupt with a vengeance twenty years later in 1692.22

By 1692 Salem Village was poisoned by factionalism. Samuel Parris arrived in Salem Village in 1691 to be its new minister, and only two weeks later, he managed to gain the support of one faction, and the enmity of another. In a question over taxes for his support and other issues, the Village took either Pro-Parris sides or Anti-Parris sides. For most of 1692, the supporters of Parris held political control of the Village, and it was they who were in charge of the witchcraft trials. What began as a political controversy soon became a search for witches. "The witchcraft episode did not generate the divisions within the Village, nor did it shift them in any fundamental way, but it laid bare the intensity with which they were experienced and heightened the vindictiveness with which they were expressed."23

Why was this factionalism so viscous in Salem? To answer this question, the first place to begin is an examination of the characteristics of the two factions. First, it is apparent that membership in the Salem Village church had a clear connection with support for Parris. An overwhelming number of church members supported Parris, while Villagers who held membership in other churches did not support him. Second, in terms of wealth, the more wealthy a Villager was, the more likely he was to oppose Parris, while poorer Villagers supported Paris. Third, and perhaps most importantly, the geography of a person tended to indicate his support or lack of support for Parris. Those Villagers living in the eastern end of the Village, or perhaps even in the Town, opposed Parris; those who lived in the western edge of the Village supported the minister. We will examine this aspect in more detail below.24

As we have stated, although the first accused witches conformed to the established pattern of witchcraft, soon all classes of people began to be accused of witchcraft, first with the arrest in March and subsequent execution of Rebecca Nurse. Nurse was married to a man with a valuable estate in the Village, and she had acquired a reputation of unquestioned piety in the community. The accusations also spread beyond the bounds of Salem itself. The arrest and execution of George Burroughs, a former minister of Salem Village who, by 1692, resided in Maine was just one example of this phenomenon.25 As the summer progressed, accusations quickly spread out of the Village. For example, the community of Andover was hit particularly hard by accusations. The success in accusing those of other communities only encouraged the afflicted persons to continue their accusations.26 As the trials progressed, the patterns of accusation, especially after May 31, began to be generated independently of the Salem factions.27 One explanation of the expansion to people of very high social status (such as Governor Phips' wife in Boston) could be that the accusers were attacking people who resembled those they had real grievances against (to be discussed later), but not the actual people. The people with real power in Salem Village, such as the wealthy Israel Porter, were not attacked. This could be because those people were too important to the community, and were both psychologically and politically "off limits" to the accusers.28

The pace of the Salem trials was extraordinary. Although there had been witchcraft trials in New England since 1647, only about fifteen people had reached the hangman's noose. When the first three witches were accused in February, 1692, it appeared that this would just be a continuation of the pattern. But, as we have seen, this was not the case. We have already stated that accusations moved into communities surrounding Salem, most notably Andover. An interesting and revealing fact is that while the accusers were still predominantly afflicted girls, it is clear that they were not acquainted with many of the people they were accusing. Often, an adult would suggest a name to a possessed girl, and she would confirm that name. With this in mind, a geographic pattern begins to emerge. In Salem Village itself, there were fourteen accused witches; twelve of them lived in the eastern part of it. Thirty two adult Villagers supplied testimony against them. Of these, only two lived in the eastern part of the Village. Twenty nine Villagers either publicly showed skepticism about the trials or defended some of the witches. Twenty four of them lived in the eastern section of the Village. The pattern that emerges is: for the most part, the western half of the Village was accusing the eastern half of the Village of witchcraft.29

It is true that no community is without conflict. Why would the factionalism present in Salem Village lead to an outbreak of witchcraft accusations? To answer this question we must remember all of the pieces of the puzzle which we have already examined, and now explore a new one. While Salem Village and Salem Town were extremely dependent on each other, the cultures of both areas by 1692 were diverging. The western part of the Village had a much more rural base than the eastern part of it, which was becoming more aligned with the commercial center of Salem Town. As the eastern end of the Village was becoming more involved with the commercial world of the Seventeenth Century, the Village was not. In fact, land was becoming more scarce in the western part of the Village, as fathers continued to divide their lands among their children. In effect, the later generations of Villagers had much less of a chance of acquiring economic prosperity than their fathers. The resentment of the western end of the Village was only exacerbated by the presence of the Ipswich road, which was the boundary between the Village and the Town. Those Villagers living along the road (which passed by the Village rather than through it) had important commercial interests with the Town, and sometimes Boston. These Villagers were the solid base of the Anti-Parris faction. Meanwhile, the Village church was the bulwark of Pro-Parris sentiment, and a hotbed of resentment towards the Town and those Villagers whose interest was concerned with the Town. If the Town had had its own political autonomy, perhaps the tensions could have been eased through governmental action. As it was, the western Villagers were becoming to feel that their interests were being neglected by the Town and its supporters, creating an almost under siege mentality.30

While the Village was becoming less prosperous, the Town was enjoying the benefits of the British commercial world. By 1683, the Town was so prosperous that the General Court of Massachusetts designated Salem Town, along with Boston, as one of its "ports of entry." As the Town's economic interests expanded, so did its political influence, relative to the Village. People who lived in the Town were over represented as Selectmen in Salem's government. The rise of a pre-capitalist class in the Town fueled the resentment of the more rural Villagers.31 The anxiety of the Village towards the Town and its interests ran extremely deep, so deep, in fact, that in 1752 Massachusetts finally granted Salem Village full political autonomy (Salem Village then acquired the new name of Danvers).32

As Paul Boyer and Stephen Nissenbaum point out, however, to understand that there were two factions which bitterly quarreled with each other is not enough to explain the Salem trials. Local factions, or economic disputes do not have to be resolved with appeals to fears of witchcraft. The struggle involved all of these things, but, above all, it was "a mortal conflict involving the very nature of the community itself." The residents of Salem were Puritans, and to Puritans, a community was not just a collection of people, it was an entire living organism, living under a covenant with God. If a person were to pursue a private interest, perhaps at the expense of the good of the community, they were not "behaving properly." In this society, where images of a tightly knit community were slowly being replaced by an image of a society where individual achievement was stressed, the commercial outlook of Salem Town represented "a looming moral threat with implications of the most fundamental sort." In recognizing this conflict between a world view which was fading and a world view which was on the rise, the true nature of the bitterness and animosity with which the two sides viewed each other finally emerges. The western group of Villagers were engaging in an ultimately doomed attempt to preserve a rural and Puritan ideal.33

By several means, many of the accused witches confessed, especially after the Court of Oyer and Terminer declared that those witches who confessed would not be executed. These confessions were often attained by harassing witness, sometimes bordering on torture. However, the act of confession held a much larger significance than simply adding one more guilty name to the list. For a Puritan to renounce the Devil and regenerate himself or herself, in an important way allowed the community to regenerate itself. Confession allowed the community to restore its belief in its covenant with God, against an evil, demonic conspiracy.34 I believe that it also allowed them to purge their own guilt over their actions during these trials. The conversion of a "Puritan" society to a "Yankee" society produced these tensions which ripped apart the fabric of Salem, Massachusetts.35

There is one last piece to add in order to complete the puzzle. These types of tensions (Puritan versus Yankee, diminishing availability of land, and so on) existed throughout New England. However, these tensions hit Salem at quite possibly the worst time they could have. Salem Village, surrounded by neighboring communities, could not send its younger generations west to seek new lands. The Village, as we have noted, did not the full political autonomy necessary to resolve its factional quarrels. It did have, however, what Boyer and Nissenbaum call a "taste of autonomy." If the Village had remained completely dependent on the Town, it would have had no formal institutions through which to express their differences. Their lack of representation in the politics of the Town only added to the resentment in the Village. Finally, the authorities in Boston did little to resolve the serious factional disputes in Salem. This did not cause the witch trials, but it allowed them to happen.36

While there are several other minor pieces of the puzzle which could be added, we have examined the major ones. There are several pieces: medieval witchcraft beliefs, unexplainable (at the time) psychological phenomena, resentment towards women owning land, and, most importantly, severe, obsessive factional disputes. Any of these factors alone would not have caused the witchcraft trials; but the convergence of all these factors in the same place and the same time produced one of the more tragic episodes in colonial American history. The answer to the question of how did the Salem witch trials occur is a complex one. It cannot be explained in a simple sentence, such as: "It was caused by Pro-Parris versus Anti-Parris factions doing battle with each other," "It was caused by a historical tradition of witch hunts." "It was caused by the pre-modern tradition fighting against a coming modern tradition." "It was caused by an ignorant reaction to a psychological problem." The Salem witch trials occurred because all of these things interacted with each other, producing a sad and terrible result.