Crime and Punishment in American History - Lawrence M. Friedman [29]
Witchcraft trials were rare in the southern colonies. In North Carolina there were apparently only three instances before 1730; in a few cases, an alleged witch sued her accusers for defamation. Nobody in North Carolina was, it seems, actually convicted of witchcraft. Grace Sherwood came the closest, in 1706: she underwent trial by water. Her right thumb was tied to a toe on her left foot, and her left thumb to a toe on her right foot; she was then tossed into the water. Supposedly, the innocent would sink, while Satan would buoy up the guilty. Grace Sherwood floated, which was a bad sign. Five old women then examined her body; they found “two things like titts on her private parts of a black coller, being blacker than the rest of her body.” This was also a bad sign. Sherwood was thrown in jail; but there is reason to believe she escaped conviction in the end.78
The search for “witches’ teats,” which figured in Grace Sherwood’s case, reflected a common belief that every witch had what was called a “familiar.” This was a small creature, sometimes invisible, who helped the witch carry out her evil deeds. The witch suckled these creatures with her specially adapted teats. These teats, then, were excellent evidence of guilt. When Goody Knapp was executed for witchcraft in Fairfield, Connecticut, in 1653, local women “tumbled the corpse up and down,” searching for marks of the devil.79
The Salem episode began in 1692. Some girls in Salem who had become friendly with a slave woman named Tituba began acting in a peculiar way—screaming, falling into convulsions, barking like dogs. Soon other girls in Salem caught this behavioral disease. Surely they must have been bewitched. They themselves testified that they were “bitten and pinched by invisible agents.... Sometimes they were taken dumb, their mouths stopped, their throats choaked, their limbs wracked and tormented, so as might move an heart of stone.”80 The whole town was quickly seized with fear and horror: the devil must be at work in Salem. Three women, Tituba, Sarah Good, and Sarah Osborn, were promptly accused of witchcraft.
In the general atmosphere of hysteria, there was a chain reaction of accusations and confessions. William Allen saw a “strange and unusual beast” on the ground one night; when he came up to it, it vanished, and in its place two or three women sprang up and ran away. Sarah Good later appeared to him while he was lying in bed and “brought an unusual light in with her.” She sat on his foot; he tried to kick her, but she disappeared. Sarah Bibber saw an “apparition of Sarah Good,” that “did most grievously torment me by pressing my breath almost out of my body”; the witch later tortured her by “beating and pinching me and almost choking me to death, and pricking me with pins after a most dreadful manner.”81 Other villagers were drawn into the cycle of accusation and apparition. Salem mobilized to fight its terrible, invisible enemy.
News of the Salem problem spread; the governor appointed a special court of oyer and termineri “for discovering what witchcraft might be at the bottome.”82 The deputy governor was named chief judge of the court. The court, mindful of the unusual, dangerous character of witchcraft, relaxed traditional rules of evidence and procedure. Instead, the court used special witch-trial procedures then current in the mother country. These included scouring the bodies of the accused in search of the elusive teats or marks. The court also accepted the evidence of “spectral sources”—visions seen by the townspeople.83
As David Konig has pointed out, it was the defiant, the hostile, the impudent who were put to death in Salem. Those who accepted the legitimacy of the court and humbly confessed their crimes were convicted,