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Books: creative works inspired by the trials |
| Background | Although the accusations of witchcraft at Salem
described by Cotton Mather in The Wonders of the Invisible World have
become the most notorious example of the hysteria about witches, the events
of 1692-1693 were neither the first nor the only instances of such accusations
in New England. Individual cases include that of Mistress Ann Hibbens,
a Boston widow hanged for witchcraft in 1656 In The Devil in the Shape
of a Woman, Carole F. Karlsen comments that Hibbens had been excommunicated
from the Boston church sixteen years before her witchcraft trial but was
not formally charged until her neighbors accused her of maleficium (killing
cattle and so forth) as well as evil actions such as knowing that other
people were talking about her. A previous outbreak of witchcraft hysteria
had occurred thirty years earlier in Hartford, Connecticut, during which
thirteen people were accused of witchcraft, four of whom were duly convicted
and executed. An outbreak at Fairfield, Connecticut, occurring at the same
time as the Salem outbreak, resulted in seven accusations and one conviction,
but no executions.
According Paul Boyer and Stephen Nissenbaum's
account in Salem Possessed, the outbreak at Salem began in the winter
of 1691 when the girls of the village, aided by Tituba and John Indian,
a West Indian slave couple, attempted to tell their futures by using a
makeshift crystal ball. On February 29, 1692, warrants were issued for
three women: Sarah Good, Sarah Osborne, and Tituba, the former two proclaiming
their innocence while the latter confessed. As events unfolded, 185 people
were accused at Salem, 141 women and 44 men. Of that number, 52 women and
7 men were tried; 26 women and 5 men were convicted; and 14 women and 5
men were executed, the last group on September 22, 1692. The true end to
the trials of the Court of Oyer and Terminer, however, came on October
3, 1692 when Increase Mather, father of Cotton Mather, preached a sermon
that was soon published as Cases
of Conscience Concerning Evil Spirits Personating Men. Condemning
without qualification the spectral evidence upon which several cases had
relied, Increase Mather declared that "It were better that ten suspected
witches should escape, than that one innocent person should be condemned"
(Boyer and Nissenbaum 10).
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| .The Accused |  Who
were the witches? Karlsen's demographic analysis of the available data
shows that not those accused but those convicted of witchcraft in Salem
and elsewhere were overwhelmingly women over the age of forty, with women
over sixty being at an especially high risk for both accusation and conviction.
The men convicted tended to be the family members of convicted female
witches. Further, although those convicted of witchcraft in England tended
to be poor, those accused of witchcraft in Salem were frequently relatively
wealthy or powerful; for example, in addition to the wives of selectmen
and some wealthy widows, two sons of former Governor Simon Bradstreet
were accused but not tried, as was Captain John Alden, son of the legendary
John and Priscilla Alden of Plymouth Colony. Examination of a Witch, by T.H. Matteson 1853. Courtesy of the Peabody Essex Museum and The Salem Witch Trials Memorial |
| Reasons | Explanations differ as to the underlying causes
of the outbreak at Salem. Boyer and Nissenbaum argue that what happened
at Salem was the outgrowth of conflicts between the rising mercantile class
and the people who were tied to a land-based economy--that is, that the
wealth and power of the merchants "were achieved at the expense of the
farmers" (Karlsen 212). Claiming that Boyer and Nissenbaum's theory does
not account for the overwhelming proportion of women accused, Karlsen interprets
the economic issues somewhat differently. In addition to the sexual and
doctrinal threat posed by independent women, Karlsen contends that the
many accused who were women with property and no male heirs constituted
a threat to an economic system based on the "orderly transfer of property
from father to son" (217); in short, that such women were viewed as tying
up the colony's wealth without performing the essential functions of bearing
and raising male children. Too, a widow who inherited the traditional "widow's
third" from her husband was competing with her sons and stepsons for scarce
resources. A similar case is that of Abigail Faulkner, who took charge
of the family estate when her husband became incapacitated and was almost
immediately denounced as a witch.
Although several of those accused were wealthy widows, Martha Carrier was not. Born Martha Allen, Carrier had married beneath her station and relied on the town for support. She seems to have been regarded as unduly outspoken throughout her life, although unlike some of the accused she was not considered to be sexually wayward as well. When she and her family came down with smallpox in 1690, according to Karlsen, "the town responded as if she had deliberately created an epidemic" (99). The Carrier children who confessed did so under provocation: Richard and Andrew, Martha Carrier's sons, had been "tyed . . . Neck and Heels till the Blood was ready to come out of their Noses" and retracted their confessions once their lives were no longer endangered by pleas of innocence (Karlsen 101). In the account excerpted in our anthology, Cotton Mather does not add that he attended Carrier's execution on August 19, 1692. |
| Further Reading |
Books: Creative works inspired by the trials Cooley, Nicole. The Afflicted Girls. Louisiana State University
Press, 2004. |
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